more pro-war, corporate deregulating, tax-cutting (social program gutting) and anti-civil rights legislature (or non-legislature?)...meanwhile bridges and roads and systems of public transportation are crumbling, collapsing and there's also an increase in freakish weather disasters and oil and chemical spills and terrorism and joblessness is increasing and there's no healthcare and nothing's getting manufactured here anymore and tariffs are rising and police stations and fire houses are closing and schools are closing and no one can afford to go to college, cannot borrow enough money and it's 19th century Russia plus robots and cloning and giant, masturbatory virtual-reality machines that people choose to live in...
There's that. And it's been humid. Pillow and I saw the President's motorcade yesterday, sort of fast and rough (a Tahoe packed with orange-suited gunmen) and limo's look so old-fashioned now. It's unstable. It's tornadoes and hurricanes and gruesome murder trials and The Yankees losing game after game..."Mr. President, I need you to answer this honestly. Is this my new reality?" And I know full well this mess isn't Barack Obama's fault. I just see in him what I see everywhere: uncertainty, faltering, fear, thinness.
Some Pop right now reflects this local color brillianty.
*I've been meaning to write for weeks about Nicki Minaj's verse on Trey Songz' (and we LOVE Trey Songz) bunkish "Bottoms Up." Coming in at 2(min):40(sec) (do skip ahead), Nicki picks up the "drunk-in-the-clurrb" sticks with some lines about margaritas and pink champagne delivered como...Miss Adelaide, a gangster's moll, a zany/glamorous hood of the 20th century, but also Kristin Cavallari. She whips up (punny!) a narrative with the perfecto line, "I don't say hi/I say keys to the Benz," which then leads to a projected, pretend snarling rage, for which she quickly apologizes with, "Excuse me./I'm sorry./I'm really such a lady./I rep Young Money./You know...slim...baby...?" And then we're talking about tabloids and Anna Nicole Smith as a possible saint. And WOW Nicki, thanks so much for reminding us that Smith's wacked-out Trim-Spa promotional VMA rant of 2004, "DO YOU LIKE MY BOOOODDDDYYYY??!!!" was a f*^&ing seminal text. Anna Nicole Smith was a trailblazer in the world of AVATARS, the art of self-making and disseminating. A genius. And Nicki too for saying so (and her everywhere-at-once, melodic delivery)! It's pretty gothic though, right?
**Like Rihanna's "Only Girl (In the World)"—I love how unafraid Rihanna is to come-off crazy and desperate (I mean, "on the brink of ___?") and self-destructive; it's her newish oeuvre (rebel fleur!). And her alarming/ist siren-voice and accompanying heavy electronics only magnify the dynamic (drugged? futuristic? soldierly?), fast-alternating paranoia and carelessness at the heart of her recent work. In "Only Girl" she expounds on Be and Kanye's "Ego"-as-sex-organ metaphor of 2009 by posing Ego-as-sexual-orientation, as...thick zombie presence, as liquor? Rihanna demands (screams), "I want you to make me feel like I'm the only girl in the world,/Like I'm the only one that you'll ever love,/Like I'm the only one who knows your heart, only girl in the world,/Like I'm the only one that's in command,/Cause I'm the only one that understands how to make you feel like a man." In this relationship, sketched on the dancefloor, neither party is responsible for their own emotions (or gender identity), neither have any power, or "command." They must force each other's feelings, act and react. They must possess one another, and in so doing both lose self-possession. The lovers are mirrors. The partnership is proof of materiality? In this rapid, loose, disordered 21st century, building and keeping and believing an identity for oneself has never been more important (never been so broadly the object-of-careers, actions, outfits, utterances), or more difficult, more maze-like and wonky and elastic. In this track, Rihanna is bluntly insisting that her and her man bind together to stabilize and affirm their identities, as if they are the only information, the only information in the world, Adam and Eve, one body, consumed by one another, blind to everything and everyone else, love babies in the womb, First and/or Last Peoples. Oooooh it's kinda chilly and doomed. And smart. I feel like it's about images too. Like, how impossible to be "the only girl in the world" when holograms and billboards and digital spirits fill the very air, making for a Floating World (visible behind our eyes too!). You know?
***Another one for self-destruction and bad prophecies right naw is Kanye (of '09's cute "Ego" swagger). His single "Power" opens better than most things, "I'm living in the 21st century/doing something mean to it..." (I have been loving invoking the "Twenty-first century" that sounds like a bell toll when you speak it.) What follows is crashing (more sirens!), "Global," genre-surfing bits and samples plus real-talk, a man drifting between tabulating baubles and mentioning/musing political consciousness and booze and powder and suicide and back to suicide doors and himself and the World and himself and the World. It not perfect. But it's so much. (And the video—magazines are history paintings!)
****Of course (I mean, history lessons are always helpful), the song that has taken my temperature best this week is a mini-throwback, an (ghost)Impala hovering outside, Lloyd Banks and Keri Hilson's 2006 collaboration, "Help." From Hilson's introductory cooing, "G-Unit...," to fade-out, it brings the rawest nostalgia, a snuffing/damning certainty that the dreams attendant to the noises (the G-Unit noises) are dust, dunzo, shaken-out. In 2010, the sound of Lloyd Banks in 2006 makes me want to cry, like it serves to conjure lost love, lost ease, lost power.
Look at this album cover!------------
Mel Tormé! Death of Empire!
xoxo
