End of Term

I, somewhat like Kanye West, may never cease thinking of time academically. And late April brings that breathless, it's-almost-end-of-term/beginning-of-deep, unknown summer feeling that simply must be met by a certain species of ethereal club-jam, a "dance song that can make you break down and cry." Last year it was Usher and Young Jeezy's "Love in This Club," a track so heavy we had to name a recurring A&P segment after it. This year--right on sched.--comes "Knock You Down," a collaboration between Keri Hilson, an all-around fantastic dame, who earned writing credits on Brit's Blackout and starred in the "Love in This Club" video, Ne-yo, and Kanye. And Lo--I cannot stop listening. It is layered and icy, ready for consumption.

I recall something Kelefa Sanneh wrote about the Timbaland/Danja beats on Timberlake's Futuresex/Lovesounds in 2006, "they sound like The Limelight imploding." And (as usual!) he's right. There is a sort of deconstruction of house music happening in these middle/late aughts and in this tune that I dig dig dig. Along with it's tripped trance beat, the lyrics spoken and sung by all three counterparts in "Knock You Down" create a very real conflict. There are shifts in tense. Keri and Ne-yo seem to conjure a dizzy, present love. Kanye seems to be writing a eulogy:

let the hour glass pass right into ashes.
let the wind blow the ashes right before my glasses.
so i wrote this love letter right before my classes.

Isn't this sort of 'yes and no' exactly what makes contemporary pop music so poetical?

In 2007, at the tail end of a blissed acid-trip in Oaxaca, on the roof of our hotel, P.M.C. and I were leading each other through a tour of Beyoncé. He had recently fallen in love with B'Day (in Ponza of all fantastic places), which I did not know (beyond requisite singles), and I had long loved Dangerously in Love, an album of SUCH merits, unknown to him. I played "Me, Myself, & I," a break-up song full of declarations of independence. He recoiled, went grey, shook his head, "No, no. I don't like this. You see. Can't you hear it? She doesn't mean what she says." P.M.C., who I trust implicitly in the sensory realms, was so very correct in his hallucinatory pang of an assessment. The essential bit of that track is the eerie, sad conflict between the tough lyrics and the lovesick, girlish delivery (the utter opposite of her potent anger/power in B'Day's reflexive "Irreplaceable").

These happy and sad, impish and powerful ballads of the millennium reflect our own pressing confusions about sex and love and gender and patria, especially when combined with one of those spooky, "imploding" machine beats. Future Perfect (ha). End of term.