Immigrant Music

It’s early evening, and I’m sitting in Puebla, Mexico drinking beers from a bucket filled with ice. Everyone is speaking in loud voices over the music. The breeze blows napkins off the table. This alley, paved with rough stones, has been blocked off and little restaurants are lined up next to and across from each other. I sit with a couple of friends and drift in and out of the conversation. I pay more attention to the breeze and the cloud of noise. Women walk by in loud shoes. The breeze presses their clothes against their bodies. When they sit down their faces are flush, red blood flowing below their brown skin, sweat shining in the angled light. I watch people’s lips move, arms in dramatic pantomimes. Their movements are immediate, even if their voices feel as far away as the sound of the traffic from the other street. I tip my beer then close my eyes for a second. From my experience, a Latin American city at dusk can envelop you completely in its atmosphere.

This is where my mind went when I heard “Un fin en Culiacán” by La Adictiva Banda San José Mesillas. The song creates an image of a weekend spent celebrating nothing other than being alive in this particular city. People dance, booze flows, cars are driven, women are bedded, hangovers are suffered, and pictures are posted, all to the brassy rhythm of the music. The song fixates, as most songs written by men do, on women as objects of sexual desire. But women also function in this song as symbols of municipal pride. Culiacán is good because beautiful women come from there, the song says. In the chorus, this relationship of women to the good takes on an almost endearing quality. “Boast to the world/Where I was born/Such fine women/Were born here.” In these words, the protagonist of the song basks in the light of the women who make the city fine. Without their fineness, he would have nothing to brag about. Women that aren’t beautiful, and therefore not worth desiring, do not count in the song’s Culiacán.

But I heard this song in the Bay Area. Specifically, I heard the song driving through my kids’ mom’s tony neighborhood in Berkeley. The truth is I didn’t even know where Culiacán is and had to look it up on a map. (It’s the capital of Sinaloa, a long, thin state on Mexico’s Pacific coast.) The song must appeal to not only people from Culiacán, and Sinaloa more broadly, but to all those people that miss home and enjoy a tuba bass line. All of those people that left home and came here, looking for a better way to provide for themselves materially. The ideological discourses of American nationalism suggest that people come here looking for a better life, but having grown up around immigrants this strikes me as not true for everyone. Many of the people I grew up with dreamed of going home but just with enough money in their pockets to live more comfortably when they got there. They didn’t come here looking for freedom or liberty or democracy. They came looking for a job that would pay them substantially more than they could get back home. They wanted better food, better homes, and more opportunities for their children. They didn’t care if they had to come here in the dark, through rivers and fences, and across deserts to do it.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. The great power of capital is its ability to move freely from place to place. The products of capital move from one area of the world to another in search of markets and competitive advantages. Investment capital itself also seeks to retain its freedom so that it may move from one industrial concern to another in pursuit of maximum profitability. Fixed capital, money trapped in physical things like factories, retail stores, and transportation, is the least mobile form of capital but it too, when conditions are right and it's desirous of cheap labor, can be transferred from one place to another. The profitability of capital depends on its unfettered movement. Why should people be denied the same freedom? Why should people not be allowed to move around in search of a place to better their chance at economic prosperity? In my mind, no one is illegal as long as capitalism creates the conditions in which the simple movement from one place to another, from Culiacán to the Bay Area for example, gives you the chance to better your material condition.

The Distance Covered

The Fourth Glorious Mystery is the most stunning. Mary surrounded by disciples and converts and enraptured in the love of Christ, falls asleep, which is a kind of holy death. She is placed in a tomb, but Christ comes to her and calls her and takes her to heaven in body and soul. Because she is without sin, her body is not allowed to decay and become corrupted. The joy that she feels as she takes her place by Jesus’ side can only be known through our own entrance into heaven. Therefore she serves as the example through which we too can one day ascend to heaven, where, if we are worthy, we will experience in our physical bodies and in our souls the joy of God’s presence.

I listened to all of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary and the prayers between the explication of the mysteries for a long time during my drive to Los Angeles. It was 110 degrees outside and my air conditioner was broken. The heat, the driving, and the litany put me in a state of intense concentration. I felt the words of the priest but not in a theological way. They provoked me instead philosophically. The priest asked me to ponder the mystery and to reconcile my relationship to the unknowable and accept it as truth. You cannot know but you must believe, he preached. The meaning is in the believing, not in the knowing. And when you think about it that way, Catholicism starts to sound like the perfect description of de Manian deconstruction. For when de Man and deconstructionists trained in his methods undertake analysis they posit something similar. Language, they argue, cannot stabilize meaning. Language and in particular the linguistic art of literature can at best only demonstrate how language cannot guarantee meaning. Language depicts its own instability and play and even in those moments when it wants to declare something about the world unambiguously, it comes undone by its own semantic mechanism. Meaning, then, in deconstruction is a set of desires, conventions, and impositions that we place on language, not something that comes from language itself. For deconstructionists, just like for the Pope, meaning is in believing.

When I tired of Catholic dogma, I searched the AM stations for right wing talk shows, another favorite of mine on long drives. There I encountered another version of the problem between knowing and meaning. A right wing talk show host speaks to an audience that shares the host’s understanding of truth. “I don’t have to tell you” is a popular refrain. As is “You know what I’m saying.” The host and his audience hold their ideological opponents in contempt, considering them stupid and, more damningly, hypocritical. Liberals, they argue, know the real truth, but they refuse to admit it publicly for fear that they will be judged. So the world arrayed against conservatives is either too idiotic to recognize the truth, too invested in the state of things to accept the truth, or too phony to admit the truth. I wish I could judge them more harshly but I feel exactly as they do but only about them. I see the same world they see and come to completely different conclusions. I believe that I am right but not because I can produce a different set of facts to contradict their arguments. Rather, I see the same facts they see but those facts mean something very different to me.

For an hour or so on the drive I listened to the Portuguese radio station. If I was being told something I already knew and was told it very slowly and clearly, I might understand Portuguese. Buried in the atmospheric hiss of AM radio, the rapid delivery of the newscasters was nearly incomprehensible. Nonetheless, I always listen to the Portuguese station until its signal no longer comes in. So much concentration and focus to understand only some words and the occasional phrase. All that language and so little meaning. To be honest, it’s more enjoyable to me than most things.

I meant to write something about Lana Del Rey’s “West Coast.” Something about Los Angeles as a powerful simulacrum whose fuel and byproduct are desire. I was going to bring in Mike Davis’ City of Quartz, the great masterpiece of interpreting Los Angeles. But the drive to Los Angeles reminded me that the distance between thing and word, between meaning and knowing, and between longing and truth has a much broader geography than my old hometown.

Fragility

“Fragile” by Tech N9ne and others is interestingly of two minds. On the one hand, the song, like its title implies, suggests emotional vulnerability. The chorus is emotive and delicate, made for lovers to whisper to each other at night and to be embarrassed about in the morning. But the tone of the verses by Tech N9ne and Kendrick Lamar is aggressive and hyper-masculine. The lyrics by both rappers are about performance and art but, seemingly defensive about categories that are often gendered feminine in the popular imagination, the words are delivered in a muscular flow meant to confront the listener. Combative and emotional, wanting to reveal a kind of precious interiority and threatened by that possibility at the same time, “Fragile” is hard to reconcile as one song. So I choose to think of it in terms of the chorus. It’s the part that speaks to me the most and not just because I’m pathetically sentimental—who am I kidding, that’s probably why. But for reals, I think it hails me mainly because it reminds me of discovering for the first time exactly how fragile I could be. “I never thought I’d be so fragile,” sings a woman in this song and it struck me as the motherfucking truth when I heard it.

When I was 12 I fell into feelings with this girl called Janet. Who knows if she was cute or smart or pleasant, it was a long time ago and all I remember are the feelings. We hung out in the yard of our middle school in a small group, and I was so full of her that I never noticed that she might not dig me at all. Which was the case. I found out that she was into my friend Ramon when I saw them making out next to me in the movie theater at the Beverly Center. Ghostbusters, I’ll never forgive you. Seeing them cut me to the bone, as they say. I mean, I’m not sure what those words mean exactly but I do remember how much my stomach hurt and how dizzy I felt when I saw them kissing. Nonetheless, I kept it together. After their romance ran its natural course—a few weeks in my middle school world—I tried again to get her attention. This time it worked. She was the first girl I kissed, no shame in getting Ramon’s slobbery seconds. I even touched the front of her bra once. I was over the moon or something. A couple of weeks into our relationship, I managed to get permission to spend a whole Saturday with Janet by doing extra chores around the house. Within 5 minutes of getting to her parent’s place, Janet told me she didn’t want to “go around” (our technical term for relationships at that time and place) with me anymore. I kid you not, as soon as I felt the period in her sentence I burst into wailing. I cried instantly and inconsolably. I was beside myself in tears and snot, a real mess. It probably took her like an hour to calm me down enough to show me the door. That’s what I thought of when I heard “Fragile” for the first time. After some time had passed, I, too, was surprised to find out how fragile I could be when it came to affection and its aftermath.

And I’m not sure all of the experiences I’ve had since then have toughened me up much. Less than a year ago, I started talking again to a girl who had broken up with me before but that I had not gotten over. We started talking on the internet because as accidents would have it we had both started reading Moby Dick around the same time. First we talked about Moby Dick. Then we talked about other things. Then we talked about each other. I kept reading Moby Dick during the whole time. I’ve read it many times before, so I was in no hurry to find out what happened next and thus read it at a slow pace. As things progressed, I began to relate the book to the relationship, ending one might mean ending the other, so I slowed my reading to an even more measured pace. I still have two chapters left to read in Moby Dick but I don’t anticipate I’ll finish them anytime soon. I know how fragile I really am.

Life Stories

Life doesn’t come together, at least not in the living of it. Too many heterogeneous events, too prosaic, too repetitive, too continuous. Things that seem meaningful get buried under an undifferentiated mass of occurrences. It’s like when you move somewhere new and in the background of unfamiliar streets, buildings, and landscapes there is a different smell, a smell that comes with the place. You tell yourself: “I like this smell. I hope I remember it always.” But you don’t. The longer you live somewhere the more you lose the sense of what made it distinct. It merges into the beige of life. That’s the way important events often feel in life, deprived of their color by the mere fact of continuing to live.

And that explains the lure of biography. Biography takes the stuff of life and makes a story. It does so by framing a segment of life as significant. This is not to say that biography selects only the most meaningful events or that it ignores the mundane because it does not make for compelling stories. In fact, nineteenth and twentieth-century literature has taught us that the opposite is true, that the banal and boring are perhaps the only things worth narrating in the prose of modernity. Biography, by selecting, declares the section of life narrated as meaningful. That span of life symbolizes a problem to be resolved by the story. Biography does what life cannot, delimit. It places a starting point and an endpoint on a segment of the incessant continuum of life. Of course life itself starts and stops, but its ending provides something much larger than narrative closure.

By biography I mean more than the kind of formal biographies and autobiographies one finds in book stores. I don’t just mean books about the lives of important people or people that assume that by telling us about their lives they are important. Nor do I mean only novels that are written as if they were biographies, whose organic structures are borrowed from the organicity that we project onto biographies, that they depict the real lives of people. Biography as I’m using the term here means every story we tell about ourselves in writing or in everyday speech. It includes every anecdote that features us as hero or victim. All the stories that we tell about ourselves aim to draw some conclusion by putting a line through life that says “here this began and here it ended.”

So when One Direction sing “The story of my life/I take her home/I drive all night to keep her warm/And time is frozen” they seek to forestall the feeling of aimlessness generated by the pooling of days. In these words life is not a thing whose very magnitude makes it undecipherable or even worse unknowable. Instead life is a story and as a story it at least has a plot if not a purpose. The figure of time as frozen illustrates perfectly the need behind this sentiment: to have life stop long it enough for us to understand it. That this desire is rendered in a bittersweet tone is not significant to the wish-fulfillment that it reveals. It doesn’t matter that life pauses for us to recognize that what we get may not be what we want. All that matters is that it pauses.

A Little Free Association

Some people get sad with the rain. Some people need the sun to keep from lugubrious meditations. But spring days bring me to tears. Warmth, the smell of flowers whose names I don’t know, blue skies scribbled by clouds, a breeze. I can’t stand it. It fills me with love and sadness. It makes me want to get drunk and stare at water. I have always lived relatively near the Pacific. In spring you can sense the sea. In the breeze you feel the movement of the waves as they rumble on the beach. Not as a metaphor. As a physical thing. The planet in its turning. Dust from the other side of the world. The breath of things moving everywhere. The full, round light of spring, filtered through leaves, dropping at a slight angle. And the sky. If only the rest of life could be so blue.  Everything else by comparison is ashes. No, not ashes, because those are also beautiful and delicate. Against blue skies and grey ashes everything we have made seems like something human-made. This is not a dismissal of human achievements. It is only an acknowledgement that we ourselves are the product of world-making and thus our achievements are second-order phenomena.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye argues that spring in literature is connected to comedy. The mythos of spring, as he calls it, culminates in a wedding through which a society torn by falsehoods is brought back together. Conflicts are resolved in such a way as to reintegrate all the participants of the struggle. The antagonist—a false groom, a meddling parent, a social pariah—is vanquished but allowed to reenter society. Continuity is prized over vengeance, community over all else. Frye is right, of course. Many, if not all, of our stories are connected to the grand rhythms of planet. In the yearly cycle of rebirth, maturity, decay, and death are written the smaller cycles of life, love, and self. But while the seasons may structure our narratives, this does not suggest that we experience them in the manner in which we write them.

In one of their earliest and best songs, Modest Mouse sing: “Just the smell of the summer can make me fall in love.” Here feeling and experience are connected to each other, bypassing narrative. The immediate sensory experience of a warm summer day can transport you by itself into a set of expectations and associations that we call love. This happens in a pre-linguistic way. We perhaps bring it into consciousness by describing it to ourselves in words but its operations occur at a level in which language is secondary, if not completely unnecessary. To describe this in a song is fascinating because the emotions generated by music so often oscillate between the linguistic and the pre-linguistic. We listen and feel music and sometimes that feeling is connected to the meaning of words in a song and sometimes it is only connected to the sound of those words.

Recently I was sitting in a bar with a bright-eyed girl. It was late on a Sunday night, the place surprisingly full and lively. Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” started playing on the jukebox. We burst into laughter at the contrast between the mournfulness of the song and the trivial lightness of the scene. “The last time we saw you, you looked so much older/Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder,” sang Cohen, and while the musicality of the song contributes to its maudlin character, it’s the words themselves that bum you the fuck out. In contradistinction, the refrain of Beyoncé’s recent “Drunk in Love” conveys its emotional content through the musical sound of its lyrics. Indeed, I don’t really know what Beyoncé says when her voice rises over and over in the chorus. The meaning of the words is of no consequence because it is the lyrical elevation of her voice that testifies to the song’s depiction of love. In that refrain, she doesn’t tell us what love is, instead, the sound of her voice reminds us what love feels like.