Routinized Freedom

The lyrics of Young the Giant’s “Cough Syrup” present an interesting contrast between surreal images of abstract danger and the quotidian flatness of everyday life. On the one hand, the song paints compelling scenes of illogical fear—“These fishes in the sea are staring at me,” and “These zombies in the park they’re looking for my heart”—and on the other, it names the unimportant inconsequentiality of it all, “Life is too short to even care at all.” The paranoid images are explained in part as the hallucinogenic effects of over-medication on the part of the song’s protagonist, effects he seems to be waiting out. “I’m waiting for this cough syrup to come down, come down,” he sings. But at the end of the song, the protagonist continues taking the medicine in order to prolong the effects: “One more drop of cough syrup.” The song, then, is primarily about the dissatisfaction with an unheroic and uneventful life and the desire for something more epic, a desire that seems to be normative—“If I could find a way to see this straight/I’d run away/To some fortune I should have found by now.” Life is a disappointment to the protagonist because it does not live up to his poetic expectations, and, therefore, he turns to the cough syrup to escape it, even if that escape fills him with dread and not happiness.

“Cough Syrup” points to one of the most interesting and contradictory aspects of everyday life. Because so much of our life is lived according to imposed schedules and routines, whether those be work or school related, we feel that our private life is the place in which we really get to be ourselves. In the freedom of the home, the weekend, the vacation, all those unregulated times and spaces that we claim exclusively our own, we can be fully expressive in the way we can’t be when he have to live and act by the rules of others. Unfortunately, for many people, domestic life also seems to be filled only with monotony and boredom. Many of us spend our free time looking for diversions, either cheap or sophisticated, to fill up the hours that modern capitalist society leaves for our consumption. Moreover, the sense that we spend our free time in the same way that everybody else does is a familiar doubt to most people. In short, the freedom of everyday life is compromised by the sense that our private lives are as prosaic, common, and repetitive as our work lives and that this phenomenon is widespread. In the space that we are granted to be most ourselves, we wind up being like everybody else.

The structures of everyday life, Braudel called them. The facet of life that we claim our own as the spontaneous expression of our very personhood is in fact ordered according to normative categories that have developed over time. Everything about the intimate and the domestic has a social dimension that is historical in origin. If everyday life does not offer an escape from the regulations and norms of capitalist modernity it is because what constitutes the quotidian is historically inseparable from the development of modernity itself. Hence the lure of one more spoon of cough syrup.

The Residue of the Past

The chorus of “Inténtalo” by 3BallMTY evokes memories of childhood for me. The weakness of the singer’s voice produces the effect of listening to music on the radio in El Salvador in the 1970s. The voice seems to come from far away, quiet and thin, reproducing the distortions in fidelity created by the technological limitations that were part of Salvadoran media at the time.  For reasons I can’t define, it reminds me specifically of listening to Celia Cruz y La Sonora Matancera as a small child—although to mention these bozos in the same breath as the incomparable combination of Celia Cruz and La Sonora Matancera is pure blasphemy. But the very tenuousness of América Sierra’s singing in “Inténtalo” is part of its appeal. Against the abrasively precise electronic sounds of the music, her singing strikes a sweetly archaic tone. Its combination of electronica and old-fashioned singing has made it a commercial success, and I always turn it up when it comes on the radio. (A brief aside: although I link videos in this blog so that you may listen to a song if you want to, I don’t ever mention them because they are visual interpretations of the music, which is exclusively an auditory medium and I like to treat it as such. The video of “Inténtalo," however, is a special case. This fucking thing made me want to hate this song; everything about it is detestable. So if you’re on the fence about this song and you want a reason to dislike it, watch the video.)

The antiquated flavor of América Sierra’s chorus is somewhat similar to the musical structure of the singles by Mumford and Sons, which have also received considerable airtime recently. Mumford and Sons is of course a willfully old-timey band. Eschewing the emphasis on bright rhythms that dominates much music today and relying on peripheral instruments like the banjo and stand-up bass, Mumford and Sons need only a barker with a speaking-trumpet charging two bits a gander to achieve the early-twentieth-century aesthetic they’re aiming for. But the rawness of their lyrics bespeaks twenty-first-century sensibilities. They are a very contemporary band whose musical inspiration comes from an earlier era of popular music.

Unlike the complicated ways sampling deals with history—something I wrote about in an earlier post—this persistence of an older musical diction in contemporary music speaks to the deep residual elements in culture as a whole. Raymond Williams describes this feature of culture as the continuation of meanings that were generated in earlier social formations that keep having relevance for us because they represent lingering forms of human experiences, aspirations, and desires that the dominant culture of the present derides, ignores, or even fails to recognize as such. Williams' understanding of residual culture involves a much longer historical time frame than what I’m addressing here but it is nonetheless helpful for my purposes. If contemporary popular music is successful while emphasizing elements of an earlier period, it is because we feel in that musical language the unfulfilled strivings of the past, even if the present remains mostly indifferent to them.

A Sort of Mission Statement

I wish I had the language when I was a teenager to explain cultural capital. Then I would have been able to explain why this conversation bugged me as much as it did: Sitting in the classroom before AP English began, one kid asked this other one what kind of music he listened to, and he responded (if only the written word could convey the smugness of the tone but it can’t): “Oh you know, stuff like REM, The Psychedelic Furs, Camper Van Beethoven [this was at the end of the eighties, in case you hadn’t guessed], and The Velvet Underground. . . . Not The Digital Underground, The Velvet Underground.” Then there were some knowing nods exchanged between the two. I distinctly remember thinking: what is wrong with these motherfuckers?

What the silent nod expressed was their agreement that not only was The Velvet Underground vastly superior to The Digital Underground but that they themselves showed great wisdom in knowing the difference. Culture, specifically popular music, established the distinction between themselves and those who were unable to show the cultural competency to understand what separated the two bands. As Bourdieu points out, these cultural distinctions have historically mapped onto economic divisions so that “taste” becomes in modern capitalist society a code for class difference. So by affirming their good taste in music, these kids were also affirming their class superiority.

Now I’m not going to sit here and tell you that The Digital Underground is as good a band as The Velvet Underground because their respective discographies show that just isn’t true. But I will insist that “Humpty Dance” is as relevant as any song that The Velvet Underground performed and that it’s commercial success does not make it any less brilliant. Just as The Velvet Underground was able to divest its music of artificiality and pandering and replace it with self-conscious and ironic artistic posturing, so too did The Digital Underground make ironic the aggressive, masculinist rhetoric of Hip Hop. “Humpty Dance” knows what it’s doing, knows how to manipulate the form and tradition that it has inherited, and it invents something new and original out of its awareness.

The quick dismissal of bands like The Digital Underground is a knee-jerk response made by people who want to distance themselves from the class associations that come with commercial popular music—it’s popular because those dimwitted, unwashed masses don’t know any better. In my mind it is one of the purest forms of cultural distinction, made by people who would normally imagine themselves as siding with justice against power, with the disadvantaged against the privileged. The purpose of this blog is to reject the cultural distinctions between commercial popular music and the less popular, boutique-ish alternatives and the social hierarchies implicit in them. I try to treat seriously music that is usually dismissed out of hand, to understand how and why it speaks to its audience. And I try to not take myself too seriously while doing it. I hope you enjoy it.

Losing at Love

The next day I was to give a talk at Universidad Centroamericana on the theory of the novel and export agriculture, but as I sat looking at the jagged horizon of San Salvador from my room in the Hotel Capital, I was interested only in the clouds. They came over the ridges dark and heavy, a sharp contrast between their crepuscular grey and the tropical green of the land. They rolled over the irregular landscape full of intent; their gloomy, flashing hearts bordered by a bright silver. My windows were opened because I couldn’t stand the idea of sitting in an air conditioned room in El Salvador­­—the place where I was born and where I have often returned, always as a misplaced native. Through the open windows I could feel the rush of the wind as the storm arrived, the density of the air change as the sky dimmed and let loose. One minute I saw the clouds snaking over the hills and volcanoes and the next everything was darkened by rain or illuminated by the transitory enchantment of lighting.

Love approaches in the same way: you see it coming on the horizon, recognize its danger but feel comforted by the distance, then all of a sudden you are in it. As much as love elevates you, as much as it makes you savor life for the first time all over again, love is also desperation and tragedy. Nothing wounds and sickens like love. Nothing makes you feel as lonely and forlorn, fills you with so much anguish and mourning. Few songs capture this sensibility as well as PJ Harvey’s “Desperate Kingdom of Love.” Her voice is pained, the guitar lonesome. The song renders the hollowness that accompanies those late hours of pining, the emptiness of insecurity that is love’s religion. And God forbid that your love is not enough to keep someone. Maybe nothing has done more for art! My most favorite song, Pedro Infante’s “Historia de un amor,” deals with just this. (The greatest song ever, ever, ever!)

Like that thunderstorm that I saw coming over the hills, the intensity that makes falling in love like nothing else is something that comes and goes. It might be my own failing—it probably is—but to me love has always been a transitory, impermanent thing. That exquisite pain that makes love what it is leaves and all you are left with is the requiem of everyday life. A relationship is what’s left over after love dissipates into routine, satisfaction, and fear of being alone. Love is ALWAYS a losing proposition.

You see why, then, Drake’s “Take Care” resonates with me. In particular, the way Rihanna’s chorus, when she emotes in a hopeless hush “I’ve loved and I’ve lost” rings true. I’ve learned recently that Rihanna’s section is a cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s heartbreaking “I’ll Take Care of You,” which is itself a cover of a song by Bobby Bland. It doesn’t matter, Drake and Rihanna take us to the hunger and ecstasy and misery of love. The song’s syncopations are the irregular beating of the lovesick and sick of love heart.

Art, Doubt, Dread, Life

Those personal catastrophes that we can’t reconcile with ourselves despite the anguish they cause are the subject of much of serious modern art. Art returns over and over to the personal tragedies that remain with you, to the lacerations of the past that never heal, but with a resignation that no matter how much those events affect our lives they nonetheless seem to provide little meaning to them. People with metaphysical certainty, like those of integrated pre-modern and modern societies, understand the pain in their lives as part of a great chain of being. Tragedies are no less painful to them but that hurt is articulated into a higher order of existence that gives it significance. In such a condition, one is not alone with trauma. The traumatic, like all things seen and unseen, is part of a greater plan that while beyond the ken of human understanding is no less comforting for it. Most moderns live in a world whose paths are darkened by the doubt of metaphysical dread. Things happen, lives are lived and lost, happiness comes and goes, and all of it seems unmoored from any kind of providential scheme or transcendental structure. We feel things should happen for a reason, that there should be a meaning for why things happened in this order and not in a different one, but despite the belief that there should be meaning and the need for it, we recognize the possibility that it all might be indeed meaningless.

Serious art does not turn from that wretched truth. It faces the possibility of meaninglessness and explores it ruthlessly. It wanders through the empty rooms of life and describes their barrenness. It says: “Here there should be a bed, there a chair, and further a table, but instead there is nothing.” It describes the triviality of life as trivial, the aimless sorrow of living as aimless. But, as Lukács writes, art says “And yet!” to life. It renders the doubt and insecurity but it poses some kind of transitory synthesis. It says: “Perhaps life is meaningless, but if there were meaning, this is what it would look like.” This is the ethical imperative of art, for serious art is always first and foremost ethical (the ethical nature of art does not depend on whether we agree with the ethics of a specific work). Art affects us because it shows us how life and the world could be otherwise, what the immanence of meaning would look like if it were a part of our lives. It describes the fragments of our lives and shows us, however provisionally and imperfectly, how those fragments could be something else.

Not all art is serious, however, and sometimes we don’t want the truth. Sometimes we want lies so that we can paper over the doubts and just keep living. At times we need an escape more than we need to be confronted with insecurities that we already know are there. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger/Stand a little taller,” sings Kelly Clarkson. Is this true? Who cares, really? Katy Perry sings: “Throw your sticks and your stones/Throw your bombs and your blows/But you’re not gonna break my soul.” That question is equally insignificant here. If you think about it long enough, you understand that these are triumphant slogans that only indirectly relate to life as it’s actually lived. But on occasion (and for some dummies, all the time) we don’t want to think about it too much; we just want to feel better.