Amores Ilegales

Daddy Yankee and Play-N-Skillz “Not a Crime (No es ilegal)” begins with a phrase that is both mundane and radical. Daddy Yankee sings: “Todo el mundo se puede enamorar/ Esto que sentimos no es ilegal.” That everyone can fall in love is not a very controversial or original idea. But by using the term “ilegal,” the song evokes issues that are driving not only the upcoming presidential election but also major social and political dilemmas that can be seen on the horizon. The movement of people throughout the world in search of a better life has made them “illegals” and by framing love as global phenomenon and claiming that love is not illegal, Daddy Yankee seems to suggest, indirectly and displaced onto safer rhetorical ground, that no one is illegal: “Todo el mundo . . . no es ilegal.” (That being said, someone whose thinking I respect wondered whether the song might be advocating for the legitimacy of same sex desire. I don’t really see it that way, but this was also the same person who pointed out that when Demi Lovato sang “I got a taste for the cherry/I just need to take a bite” in “Cool for the Summer” she was making reference to Lesbian sex, an idea that had NEVER occurred to me, so.)

Associating love and the law has been a common theme in contemporary Latin American pop music. Maná’s “Amor clandestino” figures love in terms of a fugitive. This fugitive love hides, travels in unexpected ways, and is inevitable. If in “Not a Crime” love cannot be illegal, in “Amor Clandestino” love does not need to be sanctioned in order to be. Love is furtive and patient and not bound by conventions. Ricardo Arjona’s “Duele verte” makes a very similar point, though the poetry of the feeling is a little undercut in that song because it’s about fucking a married lady on the sly. My favorite song on this theme is Julieta Venegas’ cover of Los Rodríguez’ “Sin documentos.” The first verse of this song always makes my heart jump: “Let me cross the air without any documents/ I will do it for the time we had/ Because there is no way out/ Because you seem asleep/ Because I would spend all of my life looking for your smile.” Here love must transgress borders in order to fulfill itself. Love depends on performing an illegal act because only by breaking laws can it meet its object. The original of this song is incredible, perfect almost, but I prefer Venegas’ cover because she sounds so resigned to doing what she has to do. In the original the breaking of the law for love sounds like an act of defiance, while in her cover it has to be done simply because there is no other choice.

The historical substratum for these songs is pretty clear. Latin Americans have for generations followed their dreams with or without official sanction. They have crossed borders in the light of day and in the night, with permission and without. Fences and walls have not stopped them and probably never will. I love how these songs take this sociological phenomenon and render it in artistic terms, not as a political issue as such, but as a question of love. These songs are fascinating because they illustrate how art works: art emerges from and responds to social and historical forces without being reducible to them. Love is never illegal and people are never illegal, but love and the law, these songs tell us, are not the same thing.

Set Me Free

I walked into the bar and she was playing pool with some guy I didn’t know and who said nothing for the ten minutes we talked. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months. We stepped to the side while he played around us, a regular clicking of the balls. She was probably already sleeping with him. But it didn’t matter much because I was already sleeping with someone else. No need to talk about those things. Best to let people believe what they want to believe. She said we should get together. I suggested she come to my place. Her friend called her over. They huddled. I pretended to study the felt of the table. She came back and said she was going to go drop him off then swing by my place. I raced home to change the sheets. It lasted for a few months after that and she went back to her friend and I went back to mine.

                                                                                                            

A year later, I was getting ready to move out of the state. My new lover, who hated my coming and going out of bed with her, helped me pack. On a break, we went to the store and on our way back a familiar car drove past. She circled around one more time. I didn’t tell my new lover about it. No need to talk about those things. Best to let people believe what they want to believe. Besides, I was leaving the new lover behind, along with the rest of the things I didn’t want to take with me. A couple of days later I was 500 miles away eating dinner when she called. She told me she had seen me walking with this other woman and that her heart had kicked in her chest. She held out as long as she could but had to talk to me. We talked on the phone for a few days in a row and a few days after that we split the difference in miles and met half way between our two cities. It lasted for a few months. I don’t know whom she went back to, but I went back to living alone.

Another year or so went by. I hadn’t heard from her in ages. Then out of the blue she sent me an incomprehensible text. I read it and set it aside. That weekend the new woman I was seeing broke it off with me. I returned to the text. I answered it out of spite for the new woman. She answered it. We stared up once again. We didn’t talk much about whom we had been with since the last time we were together. No need to talk about those things. Best to let people believe what they want to believe. We had loved each other badly. And that love and desire and craziness had lasted for a long time, even as we moved between different beds and different lovers. But this time, after a couple of months, it was almost all over. We broke up one last time, with little drama and only a little heartache.

I love Adele’s “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)”, but the part I don’t understand is when she sings: “I’m giving you up/ I’ve forgiven it all/ You set me free.” I don’t understand the agency of it, the willfulness. I didn’t give her up and she didn’t set me free. One day it was over and that was that.

Let Us Lament All the Lost Boys

Ruth B’s “Lost Boy” doesn’t seem like it belongs on commercial radio. It sounds like a show tune. Also, it is based on a children’s fantasy, whereas most pop songs today are juvenile sexual fantasies. To some people the minimalist approach—voice and piano—would make it more like “real music,” which is another way of saying it lacks the ornamentation of mainstream pop. But I like flashy distractions, so that argument is dumb to me. Honestly, I don’t know if I like it or not. I do appreciate, however, the way it foregrounds the fantasy that it embraces. For all its resonance, its evoking of isolation, loneliness, and the desire to belong to a world in which those feelings are sublimated into everlasting play, the song nonetheless recognizes that such transcendence is a fantasy. “Run, run, lost boy/ They say to me/ Away from all of/ Reality,” she sings. To long for a world in which we overcome the “no place we call home” of modern alienation, the burden that we romanticize by the name of individualism, is indeed to run away from reality. We may indulge in fantasies in which we don’t have to deal with all of the things that come with being grown-ass adults, but to do so, the song maintains, is to avoid the real. The wistfulness of the songs, its pretty sadness, is effective because its longing can never be fulfilled. There is no Neverland for any of us to find again and our childhoods are forever gone.

And that is a good thing to admit. For too long American popular culture has embraced the idea of an “endless summer,” in which men remain “lost boys” and women are girls that don’t make too many demands. Taking stock in the 1960s of American literature up to that period, Leslie A. Fiedler observed that while many canonical American novels could probe with incredible profundity themes like loneliness and terror, and they could embrace history and transform it into symbols capable of expressing deep yet esoteric truths about the human condition, what many of them could not do was understand the inner workings of love, sex, and desire between two human beings. And those books, some of the most read and most popular American novels, certainly could not understand a woman’s perspective.  All that Natty Bumppo, Ishmael, Huck Finn, or Jack Kerouac, for fuck’s sake, could do was run away from women. Women represented sex, marriage, and responsibility. In other words, they meant leaving Neverland and entering into reality, or as the writers often put it, entering into “civilization.”

That feeling, seemingly engrafted into American culture, is never far away, though. The singer of Twenty One Pilots’ “Stressed Out” sings about missing his childhood and describes entering into adulthood as a fall: “We used to play pretend/ Give each other different names/ We would build a rocket ship/ And the we’d fly it far away/ We used to dream of outer space/ Bu now their laughing at our face/ Saying: ‘Wake up, you need to make money.’” Adulthood is presented here as the violation of the possibilities of childhood. The intangible and immaterial things have to be sacrificed for the crass materialism of a grown up life. Yes, you have to make money when you are an adult. But that’s not all there is. Having a drink in the dark with the television playing quietly as my kids sleep in their room is a pleasure I never could have imagined as a child. Making dinner, picking children up from school, riding a bike to work, drinking a cup of coffee, reading books, driving far away to see someone, these are all pleasures of adulthood.

But the singer is this song rejects adulthood and wants to return to the warm embrace of his mother: “Wish we could turn back time/ To the good old days/ When our momma sang us to sleep.” Fiedler used a startling phrase to describe how women were often depicted in American fiction: they were either “monsters of virtue or bitchery.” Lost boys, always on the run, cannot settle down with the reality of women who make demands. If they can’t do that, then they’ll settle for a mother who will give and ask for nothing in return. Get lost, boys, get lost.

Been Wondering for Days

The first line of the chorus—“Been wondering for days . . .”—and the beat, together they are lyrical. The kind of lyricism that one feels listening to the radio, stuck in rush hour. In the middle of ten lanes of slow-moving traffic I turned to the left and the San Francisco Bay looked like a lagoon, the Golden Gate small and fragile in the distance. Behind me cars came off the Bay Bridge in a gentle arc. Ahead of me the cars stretched without pause. This song played on the radio and my mind was in a commotion. To the right of me I saw a car with three young people in it. A young woman in the back seat, her hair in a bun. I could barely see the side of her face, but she was beautiful in my imagination. I made up stuff about their conversation, dumb but full of warmth. I stole glances to see more of her and of them. They were framed by the lake and the thin trees of Aquatic Park. I stood once on the bridge that looks down on that lake, following the slow swimming of a turtle, large and poetic just beneath the surface of the water. I wanted the radio to keep playing this song over and over. Not because I love it any more than other popular songs but because it made sense: the rhythm of the cars inching forward; city life and its distinctive pulses; the attenuated lyricism of the radio. When I go camping I resist the urge to find nature more meaningful than the arbitrariness of the city. The Milky Way glowing above; the sound of animal life in dark, unseen spaces; ashes blowing away revealing a burning ember beneath. We make patterns out of stars and read them like stories. But sometimes the stars just look like bite marks, and no one reads those. The car with the young people pulled further ahead and my heart broke. I thought of Wallace Stevens, that racist motherfucker, and his beautiful poem, “Sunday Morning”; a poem that still makes my heart race as much as it did when I first read it as a teenager. The traffic, the sight of the sea and the lake, the loss of the young people were my “comforts of the sun,” my “pungent oranges and bright, green wings.” “Sunday Morning” asked whether it was possible to find in beautiful everyday things something that could fulfill our desire for the transcendental; whether we could love the sun “not as a god, but as a god might be,” in communion with us all. I want to love a traffic jam and the radio in the same way, to feel them not as a thing which keeps me from experiencing life, but, rather, as a sometimes unexpectedly beautiful part of life itself.

Running Wild, Running Free

What is bourgeois culture? It is certainly not the depiction of the factories, trading houses, corporate buildings, and warehouses that make up the bone and blood of the life of capitalism.  The monotonous hum of those mechanisms of industry is almost anti-aesthetic. Like in Wilhelm Meister, when Wilhelm turns on his father, the merchant, and pursues a life in the theater instead. A life in the service of capitalism is not a life worth living, says the novel.

Films, like Up in the Air or About Schmidt for example, sometimes depict the middle men and women of capital: the salesmen, the accountants, the claims adjusters, and other assorted office types. But the lives of these people are portrayed as generally grey and empty, a façade or a charade that unravels with retirement, unemployment, or some kind of life emergency. In most films and televisions shows, work is an insignificant aspect of a character’s life, what separates the really important episodes of that life. Unless work is considered heroic, like a firefighter or a detective or something, but those kinds of jobs fit uneasily under the category of capitalist labor. So bourgeois culture, which emerged because of capitalism, depends on capitalism, and is made under the conditions of capitalism, seems to want nothing to do with the basic structures of capitalism.

This is striking. For in this day and age the one freedom we have surely lost is our ability to live outside of the necessity of wage labor, which is another way of saying outside of the demands of capitalism. We must, all of us, engage with the imperatives of capitalism. Capitalism conditions our lives, insinuates itself into every aspect of our existence, and reshapes our desires and emotions. But the economic system that gave rise to the bourgeois class seems to play almost no part in its culture other than as representing the unimportant part of life.

Franco Moretti describes it perfectly: the stronger the social control of the bourgeois classes and of capitalism in general, the weaker seems the identity of its agents. Bourgeois culture, we can say, is almost anti-capitalist, but only in the sense that bourgeois culture allows you to indulge yourself in the belief that the power of capitalism doesn’t affect you because it does not provide any of the categories of your identity. YOU! You are free from economic necessity. You are free from the need for work and the desire to consume. You are free from the regulation and conformity of modern life. You are free from compulsion and control. You are free to choose your own life and define your identity as you see fit. YOU!

X Ambassadors’ “Renegades” is a perfect example of bourgeois culture. It asks you to reject social conventions and expectations. It wants you to “break the rules,” follow your heart, and runaway. It suggests there is a better place out there, away from the demands of society, which it understands as inessential at best and false at worst. It encourages you to determine for yourself what matters. It allows you to identify with the outcasts of society. Laws don’t matter. Work doesn’t matter. Money doesn’t matter. By rejecting the requirements of capitalism, this song makes it easier for us to live with them. We may have to get up every morning to make sure we get to work on time but in our hearts we will always be running wild and running free. And that is what really matters.