Darkness and Being

Goddamn Kelly Clarkson, no? The hits keep coming. It’s something about her voice, at once very accessible yet able to soar brilliantly at those key moments of sentimentality. And also the lyrical content of her songs: they depict the evasions, the half-truths we tell ourselves without the critical edge that would make us push deeper. In her latest single, “Dark Side,” she does this by inverting things, by presenting a self-preserving lie as if it were a damming truth. The song begins with what seems to be a moment of vulnerability: “There is a place that I know/It’s not pretty and few have ever gone/If I show it to you now/Will it make you run away.” Here she describes in a generalized way those late night discussions, early in a relationship, in which lovers find themselves talking about the minor disasters and painful defeats that have made them who they are. “Dark Side” suggests that these discussions create a condition of uncertainty and fear in which we feel a deep insecurity that what we have revealed about ourselves will drive our object of love and desire away from us. Clarkson addresses that fear when she sings: “Don’t run away/don’t run away/promise me you will stay.” She expresses the defenselessness of the situation succinctly when she sings: “Will you love me?/Even with my dark side?” But this is mostly self-serving bullshit.

There is a scene in Blood Meridian in which Judge Holden makes gunpowder by mixing powdered sulphur, nitre, and charcoal. Then he takes out his dick and pisses on the mixture. He asks the other men in the group to do the same as he blends the foul concoction with his bare arms. He laughs and cajoles the men to piss for their lives as the urine splashes on him. He spreads the “bloody pastry” on rocks to dry and soon it becomes the substance they use to kill the dozens of Indians who were following them, intent of revenging an earlier massacre. It’s a perfect encapsulation of Judge Holden, a malevolent sexualized predator whose prowess produces only death and chaos. The Judge is the evil, pulsing heart of Blood Meridian, just as the sinister Captain Ahab and the amoral Colonel Thomas Sutpen are the rotten hearts of their novels. Despite knowing the brutality that rests within him, we are drawn to Judge Holden. He tempts us with his seductive sophistries, draws us to him by rendering immorality and the absence of ethics as the only reliable human truths. The Judge’s evil is, in a perverse way, the only thing we can love about him.

It’s the darkness that’s compelling and not just for literary characters. In a social imaginary that locates personal identity within the subject, which rejects the idea that what you look like, what you wear, and even what you do and say define who you are, it is what resides within you that matters. In such a context, your hidden shadows are absolutely central to who you are. In some ways, in our society it is only those private episodes that you can’t share with everyone because they reveal too much about you that make you different from everyone else. All people are good in the same way; it’s the dark side that, like Judge Holden, makes us unique and alluring. So Kelly Clarkson’s question about whether someone will love her even with her dark side is really a fearful evasion of what she and the countless people that identify with this song really want to but are afraid to ask: is my dark side interesting enough to be worth loving?

Trains, Payphones, and Other Archaic Stuff

It was probably close to 1:30 in the morning when I got out of the cab. This was the mid 90s. I was deep in the suburbs of Portland, somewhere near the border between Beaverton and Tigard. She lived in one of the sprawling apartment complexes with names like “The Outlook” and “Cedar Crest” that sound like nouveau riche country clubs. These indistinguishable shitholes encroach on one another, vying for the rental dollars of white people who for all kinds of avowed and disavowed reasons can’t stand living in actual urban spaces. I hated myself for going out there but my self-loathing did not slow me down one bit. She usually stayed with me downtown, so I had been there only a couple of times before and never sober, but I was able to find her apartment without much trouble. I knocked on her door, loud enough to wake her but not loud enough to trouble other people. She didn’t come to the door. I knocked louder. Nothing. I knocked louder still. One of her neighbors yelled out the window, then another did. I swayed in place trying to figure out what to do next. Sometimes alcohol turns your mind into a magician and you fall for the misdirection and slight of hand. I believed that she just hadn’t heard me and that if I called her then she would for sure wake up. I remembered the cab driving past a payphone near the manager’s office. I backtracked to the payphone. I put three coins in, dialed the number, and heard the beep-beep-beep-beep of the busy signal. I dialed again. After a few times I realized all at once the truth of the situation. But even after I understood that she was never going to answer the phone or open her door I continued to dial her number over and over because there was some comfort in the repetition.

I tell you this story in order to illustrate why I understand the situation described in Maroon 5’s “Payphone.” The song’s protagonist is separated from his love and he spends what little he has left on a machine that he hopes will bridge the gap. Many young people can relate to the pathos I’m sure, but how many can relate to the events that concretize the song’s intent? I’m fairly sure that most people under 30 have only infrequently used a payphone and that many people in their teens and early 20s never have. Payphones, at any rate, are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of the vast majority of the people to whom this song was directed. It reminds me of Tom Waits’ incredible “Train Song,” a tune equally anachronistic. When was the last time you skipped town on a train, the trailing smoke a lingering reminder of everything you left behind evaporating into nothing? A payphone and a train can continue to function as metaphors of desperate loneliness despite the fact that they are no longer features of our everyday lives because culture always trails behind experience. Humans act in the world and culture provides the terms through which we understand what we did. That trains and payphones continue to be adequate figures speaks to the belated quality of culture, always interpreting the present through the categories of the past.

Earnestness in an Ironic World

Modernity has created a reality characterized by distances. There is a grave gap between the categories through which we consider the world and the world as it actually is. We think of political freedom as a constitutive feature of modern society, yet we are often confronted by the contemptible cynicism of our elected officials and the outright hypocrisy of the political system that governs us and which makes an unfunny joke out of our notion of free political choice. We consider free economic choices to be the sine qua non of the modern order, but the monopolistic drive of capital has created such systemic imbalances that the only really free economic actors seem to be multinational corporations and the transnational elites to whom they are beholden. Lastly, individual freedom is the most important feature of the modern social imaginary, but it is abundantly clear that we are extraordinarily self-regulating and that we willingly curtail our personal freedom in order to create a stable society even in the face of poverty, inequality, and injustice. We internalize the world’s distances as the space between who we are and the image of what we think we should be. As the Buddha observed a long-ass time ago, the desire born out of our inability to accept ourselves as we are places us on a wheel of suffering that turns on and on without relief. Modernity has intensified this existential restlessness. We constantly “work on ourselves” in order to change into the image of who we think we should be, or we “give up” and accept that we will never be who we were intended to be. Either choice or their countless variations reinforce the belief in the space between our two different selves.

Irony in modern art is the recognition of this condition. In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács argues that irony is essential to the form-giving ethical intent of the modern artist. In order for a novel to be a true artistic object, argues Lukács, it must be saturated by the ethical intent of its creator, otherwise it remains an abstraction, or, even worse in his mind, entertainment literature. But because the artist concedes that in a world of distances his/her ethical intent cannot be simply incorporated into the work without it seeming one-sided or subjective, s/he must treat that ethical intent ethically and subject it to a kind of objective scrutiny. In other words, the work must treat its own ethical intent critically, must constantly question its own intentions. Simple earnestness appears from this perspective to be painfully naïve or perhaps even stupid.

Self-aware sincerity is a problem for everything I said above. Take for example “Hold On” by Alabama Shakes—or their whole album “Boys and Girls,” which is uniformly great. “Bless my heart and bless yours too/I don’t know where I’m going to go, I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she sings. The second verse I cite here is a typically modern affirmation that the aims of life and the manner through which to achieve these aims are no longer directly given. We have all become seekers in a world in which meaning is no longer immanent. But the first verse is a declaration of something totally contradictory: the belief in the transcendental that the song later repeats by insisting, “there must be someone up above/saying […] you’ve got to come on up!” In this context, the sincerity of this belief does not appear naïve or unsophisticated—it is made soberly while taking into account the modern predicament. This kind of earnestness is simply a problem that outlines the contours of the unevenness of modernity, a modernity that has spread everywhere but is experienced differently in every place.

What’s up, motherfuckers?

When “Bailando por el mundo” by Juan Magan, ft. Pitbull and El Cata, comes on the car radio I can’t help but squirm in my seat in a poor pantomime of dance. Unless you’re dead inside, the hard rhythms of the song push your shoulders and hips back and forth, moving you across an imaginary dance floor in a graceful glide that you could probably not easily reproduce in real life. The lyrics also put you in the close company of a partner and here memories fill the mind with all those sensations of dancing near someone whose smell makes you dizzy with lust, whose accidental touches seem to electrify your skin.

But the song also takes me to other places in the past. It reminds me of block parties in Santa Ana, El Salvador in the 1970s. There were moments in those evenings when a crowd-pleasing rump-shaker like La Sonora Dinamita’s “El ciclón” would come on and everyone would rush in and start dancing. And even if you thought of sitting this one out some feverish laughing fat aunt, her hairline soaked with perspiration from dancing, her silly pink rouge nearly washed off her brown skin, would grab you by the arm and pull you out into the dance floor. I was a small child, and I remember the mix of embarrassment and joy as I was dragged out to dance. She would take one of your hands in her chubby fingers and place the other one in the small of her back, where you could feel the sweat evaporating through her thin, polyester dress—I know I was not alone in feeling some relief when in the 80s the “Poque-Poque,” a dance you did solo by pivoting on the balls and heels of your feet, displaced couples' dancing in Santa Ana. Then you and your aunt would take your place in the throng of dancers, everyone turning this way and that, the crowd shifting deliriously and unpredictably like leaves blowing in a swirling wind. The block parties were always in July, during a month-long municipal celebration that coincided with the rainy season. The damp air enveloped you, contained you as if in a palpable medium, and promised rain. I have no memories of storms interrupting the parties, just of everyone dancing under the threat of rain.

Are “Bailando por el mundo” or “El ciclón” great songs? How do you answer that question through an abstract definition of art that separates the aesthetic experience of music from the social experience? Under scrutiny as isolated aesthetic objects, dance songs do poorly. Their lyrics are often not very sophisticated and their musical structure tends to be simplified and repetitive. But to treat them like this confuses the issue. It’s on the dance floor, among a community of listeners, where these songs reveal their true intention. They aim not to transfix the individual listener but to get everyone to participate in the musical experience. They are the truest, most democratic kind of popular music: they intend to engage the most people in a shared form of artistic enjoyment. (And yes, this is why they are the most commercial form of music. And yes, this is also why record companies try to homogenize and package them for easy consumption.) The quick rejection of commercial dance music among some smarty-pants-a-holes I know signals, in my mind, an affirmation of the solipsistic tendencies of modern life and a rejection of the social and collective practices contained in the word “popular.”

Love You , Maybe

Carly Ray Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” is pure bouncy and accessible pop. This is the kind of song that you could mock easily if you transposed the lyrics onto a slower and more sober tempo. But that’s neither here nor there because it nonetheless communicates an emotion and a desire familiar to all of us: the perfect conjunction of infatuation, longing, and possibly love that sometimes accompanies meeting someone new. For young people, this possibility seems always within the immediate horizons of experience—at least as a fantasy that gives structure to many of the social interactions they engage in. For older people, things are more muddled. Some ding-dongs probably still think in terms of the shallow illusions that make life bearable. Take a stroll down the personal ads and you will find some sad sack that insists that s/he “still believes in true love and that I’m going to find the one.” I hope you’re just saying that, I find myself thinking. Against the background of those fantasies, “Call Me Maybe” also serves as a negative of what is lost when love, sex, and desire become disentangled from each other as the small catastrophes of life multiply before us.

The premise of “Call Me Maybe” is the chance encounter between the song’s protagonist and a stranger with whom she is instantly smitten and whom she invites to contact her. Her vulnerability at the overpowering urge generated by the situation and the willingness to make herself available to someone she doesn’t even know creates the drama of the song. Probably all of us know the feeling it describes, the physical want and the emotional overload that comes with a deep, deep infatuation with someone new, an infatuation that you know will overcome you and transform into love under the right circumstances. If you don’t know the delight and agony of that feeling, then you, my friend, need to get a fucking life, pronto. But if you’ve been through that gauntlet a few times and you’ve also experienced all the other tragically banal consequences that accompany this process, then the song hails you on a different frequency.

When I was young, I fell in love every day. I couldn’t have a conversation, a long interaction with a pretty girl without losing myself in the churning waters of affection. A kiss—let’s not even mention sex—sometimes felt like a wedding vow, and if this seems overwrought and melodramatic, it’s because it was. I’m not sure when sex and love become separate things for people but for some this a progression. Sexing it up safe in the knowledge that it will never have anything to do with love seems like a kind of freedom to many. And at some point even sex and desire can become disconnected—I don’t just mean in the case of long term relationships when sex becomes an option between doing it and watching Law and Order and you’ve seen that episode twice already—so that sexual relationships can be maintained without any real sense of desire. Beyond nourishing our hopes and illusions, “Call Me Maybe” also awakens memories of all the things some of us have lost over the years. I’m not sure I have it in me to experience again what the song describes but in the paradoxical poignancy of its happy rhythms it reminds me that I once did.