Train and the Work of Stupidity

The guys of Train are the undisputed kings of mellifluous horseshit. Their singles are joyously happy and catchy; they are underwritten by an unshakeable sing-a-long quality; and they are deeply stupid. When happily singing along to a Train song alone in the car you will inevitably come to that moment of consciousness when you realize what you are actually singing and you’ll think, “Jesus, what is this shit?” I had that moment today while singing the chorus to their new single “Drive By.”

“Oh I swear to ya/I’ll be there for ya/This is not a drive by-y-y-y-y/Just a shy guy/looking for a two-ply/Hefty bag to hold my-y-y-y-y-y-y love.” There it is in all its silliness. The first three phrases make sense. They prepare the explanation for why the protagonist of the song vanished after the one night he spent with the object of his desire. Then it gets baffling. I’m shy, he claims, and I need a container for all of this love. Huh? How does it follow from your shyness that you won’t see someone until you have the right container for the love you feel? Frankly, this is the kind of crap you tell someone you never intend to see again after your one night stand: “really, baby, I love you too much to ruin what just happened by seeing you again.” But it’s the metaphor itself more than its lack of logic that is appalling. I think that name-brand, two-ply garbage bags don’t belong in romantic art, and I doubt that this will become a common metaphor for explaining the depth of one’s love. These guys have a history of choosing strangely banal figures for illustrating love. In “Drops of Jupiter” the singer asks his loved one to imagine the delights that await their romance. He sings: “Can you imagine no/First dance, freeze-dried romance/Five hour conversation/The best soy latte that you ever had/and me.” The best soy latte, for reals? These guys must write songs like Brick Tamland talks about love: just mention the first thing you see. I love lamp!

To be fair to Train, however, nowhere does it say in the popular music handbook that pop songs are supposed to make sense or not sound stupid. If that were the case, considerably less music would exist. Even a perfect song like Chuck Berry’s “Let It Rock,” for example, is mostly free-association gibberish. The Stooges’ “No Fun” is a self-aware exploration into the sense of self of someone who does very little thinking beyond their own immediate sensations and desires. That is, it’s a song about a dummy. Lastly, there are song like The Cramps’ “Human Fly” (which begins with these extraordinary verses: “Well I’m a human fly/I-I spell f-l-y/I-I say buzz, buzz, buzz/and it’s just because”) that make it impossible for the listener to decide whether they are stupid songs or songs about stupidity. In short, pop music has always had plenty of room for idiots.

Yet one gets the sense that the Train guys don't see themselves as idiots. Their songs are dumb by accident. So how do we explain their success other than by assuming that the people who buy their records must also be stupid? The large share of the explanation is that their songs are just musically very accessible and catchy. But the unsophisticated quality of the lyrics is also part of their appeal in as much as they provide a very unthreatening and distracting version of art. Sometimes we want art to raise us above the mire of the everyday by confronting us with difficult truths and sometimes we want it to divert our attention by painting the dirt. Train are doing the latter even if they probably imagine that they are doing something else.

Martian Genres

When I hear Bruno Mars sing I picture him leading Journey through a particularly soulful version of “Separate Ways.” The timbre in his voice seems so well suited for Journey’s catalogue that it feels like he and Steve Perry were cut from the same sweetly melodramatic cloth. Both of their voices manage to be appealing even when singing the most conventional or lugubrious lyrics. Bruno Mars, unlike Perry however, is associated with “Urban” music, which is a polite way of saying black music.

Associated but he doesn’t quite seem to fit. He has sung catchy choruses in successful R&B and hip hop singles by B.O.B., Travis McCoy, Eminem, Lil’ Wayne, and Snoop Dog and Wiz Khalifa (see below). Despite this visibility though, you can’t say that his solo music sits comfortably in those traditionally African-American genres. His singles are oddly unclassifiable crooner tunes that would seem out of place if not for the universality of their sentimentalism or the production value that makes them sound completely up to date even if to people with a sense of music history they sound like they’re from an earlier era of pop.

Ill fitting music this, not beyond genre but not in it either. Much like Bruno Mars himself. He is ethnically ambiguous: neither black, white, Latino, or Asian but also all of them at once. He is a half-Puerto Rican, half-Filipino, Hawaiian-born former Elvis impersonator. I have no way of quantifying this but it seems to me that somehow his racial ambiguity makes his generic ambiguity more palatable. Because we can’t place him racially, it makes it easier to accept his generic indeterminacy.

I’m not sure how deep the connection is in popular music between racial fluidity and generic fluidity. But it certainly speaks to the unspoken racial boundaries that make up our world. Lenny Kravitz, for example, is a commercially successful artist although he is known for performing in a musical genre not traditionally associated with African-American performers, guitar driven rock. But clearly Lenny Kravitz is mixed-race. Even in our one-drop society, his phenotypic appearance suggests racial intermixture. More than that is his name,“Lenny Kravitz,” which suggests less a decadent rock star than it does a wise-cracking comic from the Borscht Belt. This stands to reason, of course, because he was named after the brother of his Russian Jewish father. This is all speculation and conjecture but I doubt that Lenny Kravitz would be as acceptable a rock star with a more “traditional” African-American name.

We shouldn’t take this too far, however. Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, Bad Brains, TV on the Radio, Robin Thicke, and many other performers have straddled the racial/generic divide. Nonetheless, the slight hitch that we feel when confronted with the discrepancy between how a performer looks and the music s/he is performing is eased some by racial confusion.

A caveat: rap metal. No matter who performs rap metal or what kinds of racial and generic boundaries it challenges, I feel about it the way most people feel about genocide: I don’t understand why a good and loving God would allow something like that to happen. Just the worst, most terrible music ever made, rap metal. Nothing justifies or forgives it.

M83 and Familiar Sonic Spaces

You don’t need to know Spanish in order to understand the core of Bebo Y Cigala’s seminal rendition of “Lágrimas Negras,” that old Cuban Standard. Bebo’s singing is so deeply embedded in the Flamenco tradition that he does not bother to adapt his vocal rhythms to the song, which is a Cuban Son; instead, he makes the Son fit his way of singing. Cigala too changes nothing. It does not matter that he is playing a popular tune or that he is singing with a Flamenco singer, his part is rendered in the uncompromising Afro-Cuban jazz playing for which he is famous. The primary reason the song works is of course musical: these masters make Flamenco, Son, and Afro-Cuban jazz harmonize perfectly.

But history plays its part. Flamenco developed in the late medieval period in southern Spain as a hybrid form that blended local musical styles with the imported patterns of Muslim, Jewish, and Gypsy (Roma) origin. The Muslim influence is so heavy in Flamenco, it forms part of a continuum with traditional Arab music, it seems to me. Along with musical styles, Spain also learned plantation agriculture from their former Moorish masters. Slave-driven cotton and sugar plantations were first developed in Africa by Muslim traders. Spain exported both the techniques of plantation economy and the work force from Africa to the Americas. Slaves and their descendants in Cuba created Son, as well as other popular styles like the rumba, danzon, boléro, and cha-cha-cha. Jazz was an expressive form of slave culture in the U.S. and it ultimately proved compatible with Cuban music. So to return to the question implicit in the earlier paragraph, why do Bevo and Cigala’s styles go so well with each other despite the fact that neither tries to adapt to the other? Because "Lágrimas Negras" as a whole reflects the transatlantic world of racialized slavery and the expressive cultures to which it gave birth. The triangular flows between Spain, Africa, and the Americas that constituted the slave economy are concretely represented in this song. It’s the sense of what Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic that we feel in this song even if we don’t understand a word of it.

(By the way, for some reason middle-class white people love this song and music like it, but they are generally less enthusiastic about contemporary popular genres. Celso Piña’s “Cumbia Sobre el Río” is every bit as ambitious a song as “Lágrimas Negras.” Piña’s song tries to fuse many recent popular (cumbia, reggaeton, dancehall, Hip Hop) styles into one whole. It is largely successful, I think, but middle-class white people are not so down with it. I don’t have the space here to speculate on the reasons for why this is.)

 This was a long preamble to the topic I wanted to discuss, M83's "Midnight City." Language in this song like in "Lágrimas Negras" is not necessary to understanding its effects. I've read that it's about Los Angeles but I don't think you would know it from listening to it. Rather than a evoking a physical geography, this song creates a kind of emotional topography. The song's very deliberate layering of elliptical synthesized sounds generates this sense. Each layer evokes diffused types of affect: melancholy, ennui, nostalgia, longing, the bittersweet, aching, wistfulness, and joy. You feel this song. It's meaning does not travel through your rational consciousness, and the voice in it, the lyrics, is not the privileged site of meaning-making. Instead it forms another dimension in its atmosphere. M83 foregrounds the secondary role that language plays in music, but what the band is doing is fundamentally true of all music.

The Sample

Jameson is right: we live in an age that has forgotten how to think historically. Yet history registers in many of our everyday things. This makes sense since the structures of everyday life are expressive of the slow moving currents that have made us who we are. We are embedded in history but we find it nearly impossible to locate ourselves in that embedding. We have been taught to believe that our world was made by us as the product of our longing and desire. Thus we struggle to think of ourselves as the objects of history and not only its subjects. The closest we seem to get to a historical sense is the reference. We invoke the past as a kind of affectation, a superficial and empty gesture. The past serves mostly as an index of cool, a catalogue of trends and styles, a graveyard for the social pressures that generated the artistic expressions that we have reduced it to. We have turned the past into a sample, as it were, and it is for this reason that Flo Rida’s “Good Feeling” and Kanye West and Jay-Z’s “Otis” are so interesting to me. Both these songs sample important artists in the annals of black music in America. In sampling the past these songs raise the specter of history, which makes claims on them and the listener even if we choose to ignore those claims.

To be perfectly honest, I really don’t like Flo Rida’s song. And I don’t like it because of the Etta James’ sample that serves as its recurring phrase. I can’t change the station fast enough when the song starts playing. Flo Rida has reduced Etta James’ swinging, lusty “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” to a cloying, repetitive hook. The past is put in service of the present in this song in a way that means to contain and discipline it. Unfortunately, it’s mostly effective, I think, and the song suffers artistically because it does not open itself more fully to the past.

“Otis” is a different case. The whole song is structured around the concluding bars of Otis Redding’s slow-burning masterpiece “Try a Little Tenderness.” Redding’s plaintive, pleading voice serves as the songs introduction. As the tempo and the intensity of the original pick up Jay-Z asks: “Sounds so soulful, don’t you agree?” And after that we’re off. The rest of the song is the usual Hip Hop self-indulgent bullshit delivered with Jay-Z’s virtuosity and Kanye West’s verve. (A brief opinionated and probably incorrect aside: I’ve never quite gotten why these two love performing together. Or maybe I don’t get why West likes performing with Jay-Z since it always highlights the former’s limitations as an MC.) Although Redding’s delivery seems to drive the rappers' song, this isn’t exclusively the case. Just as significant is the music playing behind Redding, the distinctive sound of the greatest house band ever in all of American popular music, Booker T. and the MGs. The MGs defined the Stax sound and we hear their playing behind Rufus Thomas, Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Otis Redding among others, that is, behind some of the most iconic performers in the history of black music--which means that although Steve Cropper and Donald "Duck" Dunn of the MGs are white, in my mind they still belong in the history of black music. Through "Otis" Jay-Z and Kanye West connect directly to that history. This song both samples the past and tries to find its relationship to it. Whether listeners will hear that attempt or not is a different issue.

The Loneliness of Drake

Hip hop is often in the business of compensatory fantasies of wealth and power. The money, the jewels, the clothes, the cars, the houses, and the sexual partners that rappers go on about are intended to be signs of the marginalization that they have overcome. “But look at me now,” they tell their listeners. This can take on cartoonish proportions. Rick Ross, for instance, asks in DJ Khaled’s “I’m On One,” “Ever made love to the woman of your dreams/In a room full of money out in London and she screams”?  Well, no. The verse is supposed to be an affirmation of a wealth and virility but it is nonetheless complicated by its lack of immediacy. In other words, if that situation did actually occur to Rick Ross his rapping about it is a testament to its symbolic and not its real nature. He raps about it because it illustrates how far he has come. He is not wealthy and virile necessarily; instead the situation proves that he has become wealthy and virile.

Psychosexual fantasies of affluence and privilege spun by once marginalized young people who render these things in illusory ways, that is much of the thematics of hip hop. Although he also raps in “I’m On One,” there is something else at work in Drake’s music. “H.Y.F.R.”, like many of his songs, is driven by conflicting impulses. The bravado of hip hop echoes in Drake’s music but so too does the feeling that what fame has brought him does not fill the need of what life has taken away. If so much of hip hop sounds like a hollow boast then Drake’s music examines the hollowness of the boast while at the same time still boasting.

“H.Y.F.R” centers on his unresolved relationship with an ex-girlfriend. He presents the background in an unromantic light. But the coldness of the past is a ruse. She remains a part of him even if now “we don’t talk too much” “just only ‘hello’ or ‘happy belated.'” He claims he loves fame and all that it brings yet it does not give him the happiness to let go of the past or of her. He raps: “Even though it’s fucked up, girl, I’m still fucking wit ya/Damn, is it the fall/Time for me to revisit the past/It’s women to call/There’s albums to drop, there’s liquor involved.” His moment of triumph—the albums to drop—is also a moment of boozy, sad introspection. Drake here sounds isolated and empty. The present drives him into the past before fame, a past no happier than the present but at least no sadder.

But this is hip hop! He cannot remain in despairing self-examination. That is a theme for other genres, like the classic country that the first line of his song references. There is also space in rock and roll to dwell on the loss that a rock and roll life brings. Drake is further opening that space in hip hop but he still feels compelled to affirm the slogans. An imaginary interviewer asks him: “Do you love this shit?” Although his verses show us nothing if not his ambivalence toward fame and the emptiness that fame cannot fill, he nonetheless answers at the end of the song: “Hell yeah/Hell yeah, hell yeah/Fuckin’ right/Fuckin’ right, all right.”