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No More Protest Songs

“Bruise too much, I lose too much”

                                               -Notorious B.I.G., “Mo Money, Mo Problems”

 The first time you hear 2pac’s voice on his 1995 single, “So Many Tears,” he’s sighing.  There’s a quick release of air before he utters a quiet, unbelieving “aw man,” a phrase that pulses with incredibility as if to say, I can’t believe this shit is real,a prelude to the articulation of devastation to follow.    

“So Many Tears” is sad and disquieting.  The vocals are laid over a sample from StevieWonder’s “That Girl,” a song about a man painfully pining for a woman.  Stevie sings that he’s “been hurting for along time,” and he takes a break from telling us this to let his harmonica dothe emoting.  2pac uses an isolated sample of three of Stevie’s harmonica notes to back the melancholic chorus for his take on pain and hurt, disaggregated from romantic love to name the accumulated texture of living a life circumscribed by disaster. Love is openly named by 2pac as an impossibility—anyone the speaker might love, he spits, would be “a product of this poison,” the stultifying toxin the song works so hard to describe if never name.  The cause of the misery in the song shifts—the deaths of friends, imprisonment both physical and psychic, sources of pressure and pain that can’t be named but are felt.  The verb tenses continually move as 2pac claims to not even be able to “have memories” since “living in the past” is a luxury he can’t afford. His “life is in denial.” He twice mentions not being able to rest.  

The song is devastating both in its content and in terms of 2pac’s vocal delivery.  His voice is scarily steady throughout—the opening sigh is the closest we get to hearing his voice break as he tallies injury after injury. You hear every word on the track, nothing is rushed.  He switches to a faint whisper when he talks about moving “closer” to “embrace an early death,” and gritted teeth when he talks about the paranoia infecting him as he dreams of his murder by nameless enemies. But the sureness of the pain coupled with its repeated articulation accumulates slowly.

More sorrow song than protest anthem, “So Many Tears” epitomizes a genre of hip-hop melancholia which has generally gone underecognized, falling under the radar in the same way the speakers in its songs often do.  Hip-hop does angry so well, and in times of injustice, we want anger from it so badly. But we sometimes miss the other affects the genre works with and through. What happens when we look for hip-hop to not produce a diagnostic soundtrack that lists ills—what is typically asked of hip-hop when it is asked to “do” something and “be” something legibly engaged—but to listen to it when its describing symptoms.

The divide between hip-hop on the “party and bullshit” tip and “conscious” rap has been a potent one through much of the genre’s history, solidifying with the rise of gangsta rap in the early 90’s gaining mainstream popularity as the Commons of the world charted a different path. Chiding rap for its creeping abandonment of its more militant origins for party anthems became a confidently-trotted out cliché.  (8 Mile dramatizes this debate with the character, DJ Iz, always chiding his friends for their lack of political content in their music)

Until recently, though, this debate had seemingly exhausted itself.  With the rise of Kanye West, who seemed to be able to do both so well and simultaneously, and with Jay-Z addressing this tension directly in later albums, classifying hip hop according to this divide seemed to make less and less sense.  And the popularity of second wave trap seemed to mean that people stopped expecting much of anything from mainstream rap (see Ghostface Killa’s recent comments about purposefully dumbing down his rhymes to make trap tracks).  

But the recent attention to the particularities of disparate justice when it comes to black lives has reopened this old fight.  Questlove, who has had a lot to say about the direction of contemporary hip-hop recently, has called for a more engaged and responsive hip-hop in light of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  In a long note on Instagram, Questlove begins by citing the bravery of the Dixie Chicks for challenging the Bush administration before nudging hip hop and then “ALL artists” to be “more community minded” in their music.  He pauses to clarify that this doesn’t mean a “breathless race to the finish on who makes the more banging “F*ck Tha Police sequel.” He calls instead for “real stories.  Real narratives.  Songs with spirit in them.  Songs with solutions.  Songs with questions.”  “Protest songs don’t have to be boring or non danceable” he writes.  “They just have to speak the truth.”

Questlove’s call for “spirited songs” is fairly measured. He tries to avoid some of the traps similar calls to action of the past have fallen into with a very narrow prescription of what a politically engaged hip hop should be.  QL goes out of his way to say he’s not necessarily looking for Public Enemy redux, describing a range of affects he’s asking for hip hop to explore.  But even with this broadened call, he cannot help but fall back upon the canonical idioms of sonic protest as his benchmarks.  Naming what he’s looking for as ‘protest songs,’ Questlove invokes familiar icons of this genre—Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Zach De La Rocha.  These three performers undoubtedly helped define the contours of what it means to be against systems and disrupt shit for a range of listeners, eras, and genres.  To call upon them is to invoke a solidified tradition of sonic protest.  The distinct vocality that Dylan, Simone, and De La Rocha each cultivated is now inseparable from the cultural milieu of protest defining their respective eras.  

Unlike Questlove, though, I’m not so sure I want hip-hop to give me protest songs—at least in a form that is legible as protest, an idiom that QL himself can’t quite dodge. Because, let’s admit it, when hip-hop deliberately enters that mode, cloyingly announcing that it’s “doing” protest music in the idiom of Dylan, Simone, Chuck D, De La Rocha, its usually awful.  When artists are trying so hard to be “conscious,” the music has a tendency to tense up in the attempt to constrict itself into older recognizable idioms of sonic protest from the past rather than seek to expand the box of what protest means and what it sounds like.  Take, for instance, the WuTang Clan’s “A Better Tomorrow,” a song that was recorded before the recent #blacklivesmatter protests in response to the death of Brown and Garner, but released with a music video comprised of footage from these protests. The song feels unsatisfying—none of its line are particularly memorable.  The lyrics call out all kinds of ills—bombs in the middle-east, mass incarceration, police brutality—without much specificity or passion, making it more of a roll call of things most everyone listening already knows are problems.  Though the sonic confusion of WuTang can sometimes be great, here its confusion just sounds muddled and kind of dull.

Common and Legend’s collaboration for the Selma soundtrack “Glory” is similarly bad. Common’s lyrics are exactly what you would expect them to be, making connections between lynching, the civil rights movement, and the recent deaths of Brown and Garner. Nothing is learned in this song, nothing new is said.  Its connections feel particularly facile, treating social movements as interchangeable whereas the film Selma does such a meticulously job of suggesting the specific historical, social and media contexts causing the events in Selma to happen as they did.  

Hip hop is not its best when it’s prescriptive.  It’s at its best when it is exploring a feeling and giving it a sound.  I want songs that sigh, songs that describe but may not be able to diagnose, to grapple with the sensation of trauma, pain, and mental illness, recognizing the difficulty of not just finding “solutions” as Questlove wants it to, but may not even know what question they’re trying to ask or answer.  What if we didn’t keep pinging back and forth between the binary of protest and not protest, conscious and not conscious when it comes to hip hop, leading us to have the same debates over and over again about what hip hop should do when it’s not giving us what we want.  What if we just stop and listen to what hip hop has already been given us may allow us to have this debate differently.  Before we implore hip-hop to give us what we want politically, we should first stop and think about what it’s already given us and see if we can more accurately name that thing first.  I want to think about the genre of hip-hop melancholia in particular, songs that deal with a lack of agency rather than hyperembodiment, impasse rather than powering through.  This is the hip-hop I find myself most drawn to, listening to the most, where the syncopations and the line breaks and the sighs and gaps present innovative and mesmerizing representations of what it feels like to be fucked over, fucked up, and fucking scared.

Most of these songs revolve around situations of violence and poverty, but that’s not necessarily all these songs are or can do.  If you’ve seen some of Notorious B.I.G.’s final interviews articulating the reality of the sentiment of “mo money mo problems” we see the sadness, fear, and paranoia that went with being the Notorious B.I.G. at that moment in his career. The song of the same name is so utterly schizophrenic, you can feel Puffy trying to wring control of the song and make the shiny-suit anthem he wanted it to be, while the chorus imploring “I don’t know what they want from me” and Biggie says insisting that he doesn’t want to fight with any MC’s anymore, “Bruise too much, I lose too much.”

2pac and Biggie are the canonical specialists in hip hop melancholia.  Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” and “Everyday Thoughts” are the darkest, explicit anthems about the drive to suicide.  But there are others—here’s a quick perusal.  Jay-Z’s “Song Cry” is one of his lone explorations of this genre, but vulnerability was never Jay-Z’s strong suit-- though as he ages he, both vocally and in terms of content, seems to be increasingly interested in trying it out.  DMX and the Geto Boys more insistently paint this kind of ennui in terms of mental illness. DMX’s records are insistently polyvocal, as he performs in two voices to invoke an atmosphere of paranoia (Damien) or the pleading of “Look Thru My Eyes” and his prayer interludes.   DMX’s entire first album moves between accounts of ultaviolence and sensations of trauma—it is so unshiny that there is no reference to a brand or a designer anywhere in the entire album.   Geto Boys’ “My Eyes are Playing Tricks on Me.” Kendrick Lamar is a savant of all kinds of hip hop affect, but particularly ones of trauma, melancholia, and panic. His “Swimming Pools” and Lil Wayne’s “I Feel Like Dying” capture the desperation of addiction and the drowning sensation associated with substance abuse. Kid Cudi’s continual sonic exploration of disassociation, wandering, and insomnia also come to mind, all performed to a chill ass beat.  

Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” is certainly the most popular version of this genre.  It’s hard to hear that song fresh, particular in the wake of “Weird Al’s” take, “Amish Paradise.”  It was a big deal when Coolio critiqued Al’s parody. People criticized Coolio for his inability to take a joke.  This was what Coolio had to say about Al’s parody:  “I ain't with that…I think that my song was too serious…I really…don't appreciate him desecrating the song like that… his record company asked for my permission, and I said no. But they did it anyway…” I remember at the time, I thought Coolio was being obstinately humorless.  Now, I think he’s got a point.  And that the depiction of him as humorlessness was part of a move to more easily dismiss him.

Danny Brown’s 25 Bucks, Outkast’s Toilet Tisha and Da Art of Storytelling and Kendrick Lamar’s Keisha’s Song and Sing About Me, 2Pac’s Brenda’s Got a Baby are examples of black men trying to tell the stories of black women who have been used, abandoned, gone uncared for.  These songs deserve an essay of their own.

Lil Wayne’s “Georgia Bush” manages to be both rap melancholia and an explicit protest song all at once, maybe the best hip hop protest song of the 21st century so far.  He captures the helplessness of bureaucracy with gasps and hmms between bars: “New Orleans baby, now the white house hating, trying to wash us away like we not on the map. Wait, have you heard the latest, they saying you gotta have paper if you trying to come back.”  Wayne’s song is all the more powerful because of his general disinterest in the register of protest.  When he finally does it, it feels all the more potent.

It’s hard to write about the idiom of protest and not invoke James Baldwin.  So I won’t fight it.  What he says here about the novel seems equally apt for the protest song:

“The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary.  Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent.”

The protest song stands accused in my assessment of doing much of the same. The worst kind of protest is a protest telling you something you already know, articulating what you already feel so powerfully but in weaker terms.  Those kinds of protest songs deflate rather than inflate—they are likely to get a lazy nod of approval but are generally skipped when they pop up on your playlist.  “Fight The Power” soars because the sonic energy matches the intensity of the fervor on the song.  The sound and the lyrics both matter when it comes to sonic protest—you gotta move the body and the brain.  

Rather than call for people to try to do this incredibly narrow affective work under the explicit name of protest, I want hip hop to keep doing more of what it has historically done best—inventing sonic and lyrical atmospheres to explore affects and emotions that go underlooked and unnamed. In response to Questlove, my call is for less protest and more frank confrontations with pain, joy, restlessness, nervousness, anxiety, other.  Songs filled with pauses, flinches, fumblings, boasts, deflations, sighs, and tears.

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This is less a post about the video for Tinashe's 2 On, which is perfectly fine but nothing great (she's a serviceable dancer, but not mesmerizing in the way, say, a Ciara is--in fact the mediocrity of the video is kind of the point, but more on that later).  But I've been thinking a lot about what R&B means right now in 2014 and how Tinashe's album seems to sum up the genre's current divides.  On the one side, you have Frank Ocean, Miguel, and Tinashe (and maybe Beyonce?  I hesitant to even give Beyonce a genre assignment since she seems to increasingly occupy a genre of one as the biggest superstar alive) who in their refusal of soul or neo-soul sound seem to be riding subterranean beats and minor chords into oblivion rather than transcendence.  (okay definitely not Beyonce)

On the other, you have Sam Smith, Jessie Ware, and countless indie and not-so-indie R&B darlings who seem to be reaching for something "sophisticated" and "soulful" -- the adverbs critics most associate with their sound.  Descriptions which also suggests just how boring their sound often is.  Yawn.

(There is another sub-division of R&B that I'm not ready to deal with here--the K. Michelle's, Tamar Braxtons, Keisha Coles of the world, who populate reality television's conception of R&B.  I would also include Chris Brown and August Alsina on this list.  I haven't listened to any of their recent albums in full, so I will table them for now.  But who these singers are seems so caught up with their various social media and television personas that its hard to just talk about them as musicians) 

 Tinashe has garnered a lot of comparisons to Aaliyah and Cassie--a comparison I find useful only to a point. (I'd also throw Amerie in there--Rolling Stone compares her to Janet Jackson, but I don't really see that) All three are/were young and pretty singers who could sing about as well as they could dance--in a way that is best summarized as "just 'aight."  All three recognized the limits of their voices--they were never going to be belters or balladeers, but could heavy-breathe you into a slow jam more powerful and sexy than any power vocal.  Tinashe seems more in control of her strengths and limits than Aaliyah and Cassie were ever allowed to be, shadowed as they were by various male powerbrokers (Sean Combs and Timbaland).  Tinashe has no such authority figure lurking in the corners and seems freer to own her voice and what she does with it.  Her list of musical obsession for Dazed attests a bit to the savvy behind her sound and image it seems that she is steering:  http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/19632/1/stream-tinashes-surprising-dazed-playlist   This list indicates to me the effort and study it takes to make the kind of music Tinashe is making right now that sounds so effortless.

She also reminds me a bit of early Rihanna, who like Tinashe, was often categorized by her minor-chord vocals which were described as evil sounding and villainous, ice-queen esque.

And I'm so here for ice-queen R&B.  While "soulful" R&B seems to have been fully co-opted by white British R&B stars, I'm ready to jump ship for something a little less try hard--something that conjures a smoke-filled room at 2AM rather than the showy melancholia of these balladeers.  I'm still not sure what I need from Sam Smith that John Legend hasn't already given two-fold.  Smith leaves me cold, as do many of the "soulful" singers currently in rotation.  "Soulful" increasingly seems like an adverb for music approximating soul but falling short.  Soulful may be the shadiest musical descriptor of our time.  

 It will probably seem blasphemous to compare Tinashe to Ocean or Miguel for many--she is certainly not any were near as weird or daring they are.  Maybe she'll get there.  Maybe not.    But there's something just as interesting to me about her investigation of this idiom of laid-back R&B that's not soulful but just chill.  The sound is flattened, the affect is flattened, this is late-night driving music.  The album certainly doesn't need all 18 of its tracks, but the number of tracks seems to attest to how far Tinashe is willing to take her investigation.  Music is having a crisis of voice right now more generally, an issue first raised by the recent commercial popularity of autotune but not ever successfully settled or fully acknowledged in its depth.  No one is sure what to do with voices that technically sound good but don't compel beyond that. In an age where the voice is so fungible, where we see good "singers" on singing competitions all the time who mostly fail to breakthrough, (I see you Jessie J), we don't really know what we want from a voice anymore--particularly in the world of R&B so historically driven by vocal acrobatics.  Tinashe has helped me embrace my inclination toward an R&B vocal less concerned with soul and more concerned with other forms of ambiance and affect.   

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Busta Rhymes - Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Can See    Dir. Hype Williams

I feel like I'm really hyperbolic on this blog.  Every video IS THE BEST VIDEO OF ALL TIME.  But, for real.  This video.  This to me is the epitome of the height of the form that happened right around 1995-1998.  Hype Williams is at his prime.  Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes are making their bodies contort and stutter in jagged syncopation, popping out in front of Williams' fish eye lenses.  There were my Saturday morning cartoons.  I watched Missy and Busta's videos over and over again, the speakers on my TV humming, unable to handle all the bass over a certain volume.  A new Hype Williams video was an event, even when he was making 30 to 40 a year as he was in the late 90's.

A brief aside on the fish eye lens, Hype Williams' most famous trademark.  The first video to use it was the Beastie Boys' "Hold It, Now Hit It," directed by Peter Dougherty, who did a lot of early Beastie videos, as well as work for Public Enemy and the Pogues. (His archive is at NYU--I wonder if other music video directors are leaving their papers places  I hope they are.)  The fish eye lens was popularized first through skateboard videos, hence making the Beastie Boys the perfect inaugural cross-over of the technique to music videos, even if Spike Jonze didn't direct this one.

How, then, did the fish eye lens, known for gritty street videos highlighting skater tricks, become the lens of choice for the most spectacular, colorful, overproduced hip hop videos of all time?  Hip Hop was ready for a little distortion of its own in the late 1990's, no longer wanting to be the around the way girl, ready to fulfill the arena-rock promises of Run DMC a decade prior. The shiny suit era of hip hop has taken a lot of shit over the past decade.  It's offhandedly used to mark the decay of hip-hop's grittiness, truthfulness, sub-cultureness to the cartoony wealth marked by Puff Daddy and the cartoony zanyness of Missy Elliott and Busta Rhymes.  Hype abandoned the fish eye (and the shiny suits too) in the 2000's for other gimmicks that similarly frame and distort, making its subjects float, glow, and shine in ethereal ways in front of the camera.  Whatever visual tricks he uses, Hype succeeded time and time again at giving rappers their dreams of looking larger than life, unreal, as weird or as beautiful or as wealthy as they wanted to be.

With Busta and Missy, Hype found his ideal collaborators.  (uh, Belly aside) With Busta's rapid fire flow, his willingness to play a character and take up the screen in a number of contortions, seemingly game for anything.  Missy too, boxed out of playing the video vixen, allowed Hype to treat her body like manipulable clay to be rigged up, expanded, and deflated.  Hype could make video games and action figures out of with these two, indulging a humorless often lost in his videos for Puffy, the least humorous rapper of all time, and the serious style of Belly.  I know why this era had to collapse and fade away, as well as the music video as a general thing. But in a week where we get new Taylor Swift (I see you Mark Romanek!)  and Nicki MInaj videos making a splash, maybe we can get back...

See also this great Grantland piece on Hype Williams: http://grantland.com/features/with-new-video-jack-white-look-back-career-music-video-director-hype-williams/

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Paula Abdul - Vibeology, 1992.  Director Unknown.

If Paula Abdul made a bad video during her peak years in the early 90's, I have yet to see it.  Paula is the definition of an artist of the music video age.  One imagines she may have been able to pull off a few disco coos before the MTV era, but her weird trembley plain-pretty-bad voice would have gone nowhere without her brilliance as a dancer enabling her success as a video star.

Rewatching Abdul's video canon made me realize how much Britney Spears followed in her footsteps, both vocally and imagery-wise.  Abdul's imprint feels so much stronger on Britney than, say, a Madonna (who is actually a better vocal artist than Britney, and a better vocal artist than most give her credit--take a listen to her tamber on Express Yourself--I can't find isolated vocals for it to post, but she has never sounded so good as she does there)

Vibeology didn't chart very well--all the weird things that I like about it probably made it hard for others to love.  The grating phrase "horney horns," the ghoulish/operatic vocal breakdown in the middle, her cooing ad-libs over ghoulish/operatic vocal breakdown.  It's these kitty camp touches that makes this song outlast some of her other hits in the long run.

One of the things I love about Paula is, given her training as a dancer, how unselfish she is about showcasing dance and other dancers.  Paula shines best in a group, and she always highlights her partners in dance crime. I also love the stagey-ness of all her videos.  For the most part, her videos all feature sets with clearly delineated stages.  She likes white screen backgrounds.  For all the attempts at special effects here, this video feels pretty old-fashioned--more Singing in the Rain than Thriller. Overall, even Paula on auto-pilot, which most of this video is, is phenomenal and highly watchable.  TWIRL IN THAT PANTSUIT, PAULA, TWIRL

The internet won't tell me who directed this video, but David Fincher directed so many of her best early ones, I choose to attribute it to him.

I'm not done with Paula yet, methinks.  She has so many interesting videos--Cold Hearted, Promise of a New Day, Rush Rush, Opposites Attract, Straight Up--that further homage is due.  I'll be back.

See:  the series of "special effects" starting at 2:40

Bonus:  Link to one of my favorite Paula Abdul songs, Blowing Kisses in the Wind.  Listening to it now, i can't really remember why I loved this song so deeply when this album first came out.  BUT I DID.   

Bonus 2: The Rupaul's drag race version

Next up--maybe Beyonce and Gaga's Videophone?

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Drake - Worst Behavior, 2013.  Dir. by Director X

When I think of Drake videos, I tend to think of the vision of multi-culti Toronto he paints in Started From the Bottom or Hell Ya Fucking Right.

Started from the Bottom even opens with an image of beautiful multi-racial children playing soccer on a Toronto parks and recreation field, followed by images of Drake's white mother and his goofy but love-able interracial set of pals.  Once we move to the "now we here" part, though, things get A LOT blacker.  While Canadian producer Noah Shebib and some light-skin girls pepper the crowd, arriving "here" for Drake boils down to getting a blacker posse.  Getting "here" also seems to imply leaving behind cold, frigid Toronto for the gated enclosures of the Dominican Republic.  But the lip-service to the diversity of Toronto boyhood is nonetheless paid.

HYFR plays on similar themes, as Drake gets "re-bar mitzvahed," allowing him to create a zany world where his old Jew crew and his new posse of Birdman and DJ Khaled, who is of Palestinian descent incidentally, collide and joyously intermingle in one big thrusting mazel. Critic Nathan Brackett, in one of my favorite hip hop descriptions ever, wrote the following in a Rolling Stone review about an earlier generation of rappers: 

"But where Tupac could be manic and unpredictable, 50 is cool and easy to be around — you get the sense that if he weren't so busy getting shot, stabbed and selling millions of albums, he would be an enormously successful fraternity president or restaurateur."

If 50 cent could have been 2005's model frat president, Drake is the frat president for today (or the real president, for that matter): cool enough to run with the boys, multi-cultural enough to get both the student body and the administration to buy in, sensitive enough to avoid too much attention for flagrant misogyny.  

But Worst Behavior has another agenda. Here Drake doesn't depict his old home (Toronto) or any of the adopted homes he often features in his videos (Miami, Houston).  Instead, he pays homage to Memphis, home of Drake's father who also stars in the video reciting Drake's lyrics.  In an interview,  Dennis Graham said the following about the making of his son's video:

"Yeah, he told me what he wanted and what he was trying to achieve. He just wanted to show where he spent his summers. People was saying on the streets that he didn’t have any street credit and that type of shit. He just wanted to show where he actually really came from. He grew up there. I brought him down every year. We used to drive from Toronto to Memphis every summer. From the time he was a baby in the car seat to the time he was 17. We lived in a section of Memphis called White Haven, and that’s where he spent his summers. And it is the hood."

Yeah, okay. As an attempt at street cred, this video doesn't really do it. Lyrically, it's one of the most middle-class Canadian of Drake's songs.  I mean, he finally acknowledges Degrassi!  And sprinkled throughout the video are members of Drake's multi-culti bomb squad featured in his earlier videos.

But I see this video as being less about Drake proving his street cred and more as Drake getting as close as he might get to an Eminem-like statement ala White America about who gets loved and who doesn't. Drake has so far resisted rapping about racial angst, being happy to play up his bi-racial background and multi-racial upbringing in his videos, but avoiding any real meditations on what it means for a bi-racial Canadian to be running hip-hop right now in his lyrics  I think we'll get this Drake in time, I suspect in another two albums or so, recolonizing some of this territory he's currently ceded to J.Cole ( after all, it took Jay-Z about twenty years to find his meta-meditative mode) 

But in the Worst Behavior video, rather than asking us to consider him as part of this Memphis landscape, Drake asks us to inhabit it with him (along with Director X, also a bi-racial Canadian who directed all three of the Drake videos referenced here) By using standard Southern rap imagery in such an on-the-nose way (parked old cars filled with people, long shots of overgrown landscape, group shots of "normal" folks), Drake lovingly pays his respects. Rather than dismantling or twisting the archetype as he likes to do in other videos, he indulges it here, fulfilling its genre requirements with earnestness, as a labor of love.

Drake gesticulates to others in the video during the song's chorus as if to convey that he's not speaking so much for himself but for the other young black men the camera lingers upon. When he raps "motherfuckers never loved us" while the camera zooms in on the faces of young black boys, one wonders if Drake is talking to his critics and their accusations of his lacking street cred or trying to speak for a broader black coalition. Given his current image as SNL and ESPY host extraordinaire, Drake's own 'worst behavior' can't really be all that bad--what his "worst behavior" might be is left safely left unarticulated in the song. But it feels like the Drake of this video is working to convey an affect of blackness that derives from being both over-spectacularized and underrepresented simultaneously, a formulation of political theorist Richard Iton. This video, shot only a few months after the Trayvon Martin verdict, feels like a distinct if oblique and unnamed response to those events, as Drake foregrounds black boys who are always presumed to be on their worst behavior, along with his Southern black father, who Drake insists we remember. 

In fact, Drake repeatedly asks us to "remember" in the video.  Perhaps what he's asking us to try to remember, or at least consider, is what it feels like to be unloved and to proceed anyway.  This vague lyric gets specifically raced and gendered in the video which, with its visuals of black men and black life, animates both the desire to be recognized and remembered and the anger at having to ask for it.

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Dirty Diana (1988) Dir. Joe Pytka

I'm so glad that if Michael Jackson absolutely had to die, he died in the summer.  And June in particular.  The now-annual "MJ Death Day" jam sessions, playlists, tributes, and club nights are exactly what you need in late June, when summer is still all possibility and fireflies and first bbqs, and when being sweaty and damp is still novel rather than the worst.  The only day that would have been more perfect than June 25 might have been the summer solstice--the longest day of light in the year accompanied by the longest MJ playlist of the year...But June 25th is pretty dope too.  MJ death day is my Kwanzaa. 

Dirty Diana is my favorite Michael Jackson video.  I was going to write because it's so unspectacular, but that's not even true.  There's no such thing as an unspectacular Michael Jackson video. Particularly given that this one is a meticulously crafted "live" performance.  But this video is certainly not one of the sparkly ones that we most associate with MJ.  There's no NBA stars, no black supermodels, no people morphing into large cats, no lean-dance, no moonwalk, no monsters, no mobsters, no roller-skate knife fight, no face-morphing, no Macaulay Culkin, no Lisa Marie, no Tito.  It's Mike, on stage, doing it.  With a lot of guitars.

I also just really really like this song, though I seem to be in the minority.  Robert Christgau called it "misogynistic as any piece of metal suck-my-cock."  I dunno, I feel like this rates pretty low on the misogyny charts, but that's to my 2014 ears. Also, half the lyrics are MJ singing in "Diana's" voice, which makes it much weirder than Christgau gives it credit. The song's even weirder because it's a sonic and lyrically mish-mash of motifs MJ had already successfully tapped--the evil groupie theme of Billie Jean, the guitars of Beat It.  It's surprising that this retreaded ground could be so good, perhaps even better (gasp?) than those earlier hits.  I think it's one of the best vocal performances of his career--Bad in general is great for slow-build songs that by the end you just want to jump out of your own skin and into a bowl of Pepsi or something.  Dirty Diana is a song that's about its entirety--isolate its parts and it fails. Put together, it soars.  But I can see why rock critics in particularly would have hated this.  Like they hated Journey.  I mean, on paper this song should suck.  It really should.  I bet Greg Tate, Village Voice critic extraordinaire who wrote an epic take-down review of the Bad album still hates this song.  (Actually, I fact checked--this was the one song off Bad Tate loved!  "Bad, as songless as Thriller is songful, finds Jackson performing material that he has absolutely no emotion commitment to--with the exception of spitefully named "Dirty Diana," a groupie fantasy."  YES!)

MJ's sonic range during this period is astounding to think about.  This single was released between "Man in the Mirror" and "Another Part of Me."  Its ridiculous that all three of these songs could all be called "quintessential Michael" and yet they are so different from one another. I feel kind of dumb even writing about MJ's talent here--so many things have been said, that it seems pointless to even write one more thing about the noteworthy things about MJ's career.  But then again, there are still so many things to discover about it.  So I press on.

I also think of this song as Michael's response to Prince-- visually Purple Rain and sonically Darling Nikki (that other mid-tempo rock classic).  Given his rivalry with Prince, I take the Dirty Diana video as Mike sending a message: "hey prince, watch me take these two guitarists and FUCK UP THIS STAGE right now."   If Dirty Diana was MJ showing Prince he could out-Prince Prince, then Moonwalker, the movie he also released in 1988, is MJ trying to blow any other musician-helmed film project out of the water.  Literally (remember that big statue of MJ?)

Michael's solo career was made on the basis of a live performance (Motown 25), and yet I feel like we still don't really have a handle on Michael as a live performer.  "This is It" gave us a little window into this but not enough. Maybe looking at Dirty Diana gives us a bit more (even if it's "live" and not live).  Since he was such a perfectionist, it's hard to imagine MJ ever really truly loving performing live.  We don't have a version of "Michael Jackson: Unplugged" for this reason. We have him in concert, but never unplugged. He was a studio artist while also being a master of stage spectacle, with control being crucial to both.

It's fitting that the guitarist on this song is Steve Stevens, most famous for his work with Billy Idol.  There is definitely an Idol-esque flair to the song but the video in particular for about the first minute, then it becomes something else.  Joe Pytka directed a few other MJ videos, Space Jam, and a bunch of Tiger Woods commercials.  What I takeaway from this is that Pytka was good at framing talented people and then getting the hell out of the way and letting bodies be the best bodies they can be.  

This may be the first music video we see Michael Jackson shirtless.  That seems pretty remarkable given how familiar the whole world seemed to be with his body at this moment in 1988.  And yet, Michael Jackson was nothing if not militantly-panted.  Close your eyes and try to imagine MJ in shorts--IT DOES NOT WORK!  It's pretty shocking when MJ rips his shirt off in this video.  When Michael's in motion, it's easy to forget just how slight he was.  All of the paramilitary gear, the rhinestones, the gloves, the hats, they gave MJ the heft and weight his actual body never really had.  His delicate bird-like chest (did i just type that?) feels jarring given the extra-human space he seemed to occupy, particularly in this moment, the pinnacle of his career.  I'm not sure what we're supposed to respond to when Michael rips his shirt off.  It's not a Magic Mike moment, we're not awed by the physique exactly.  But maybe we're awed that there *is* a physique--that it's not just animatronic machinery moving around in those high-hemmed pants and white blouses.  

I don't have much to say about the "legs" B-roll video that permeates this video.  It's there, its dumb, I wish it wasn't there.  Its purpose seems to be to tie it back to The Way You Make Me Feel video.  I guess.

Highlights: 

1:10--MJ's got one band-aid on on the tip of his finger.  Was this a "thing" ala the one glove?  Or did he just cut himself on a bagel slicer?  It looks cool though.  I choose to believe its ET inspired fashion.  He also has it in the real live performance of this at Madison Square Garden, so I guess it's a thing.

3:28--Great shot of Jennifer Batten, MJ's longstanding female guitarist.  BITCH IS BAD!  I mean, i love MJ's pelvic thrusts with Steve Stevens towards the end of this video, but I think Jennifer Batten could have done the guitar solo just as well.  More Batten please.  (Which you get in the Bad Concert Tour performance here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8uoWxa4cUY

3:59: Aforementioned pelvic thrusts

4:06:  White t-shirt ripped off, BAM

4:37:  Okay, this is my favorite MJ move of ALL TIME.  for real.  When he's posing for the crowd, kind of leaned over, and then just moves slightly into another pose.  It's so great, it's so classic even if it's not iconic on the level of the moonwalk or the toe-stand or the lean.  It's just so cool looking.  When I close my eyes and think of Michael Jackson, that's the two seconds I think of.

Watch this space--Drake coming up in the next day or two.  Time to dip into more contemporary times...

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Bush - Glycerine

My subtitle for this video is "the video where only Gavin Rossdale gets to have a face. A LOT of face"

This video may seem like an odd choice to write about here and now.  It is nondescript in just about EVERY WAY imaginable.  It has that weird circus-y stutter-edit that a lot of videos from the mid-90s have, becoming increasingly Ring-esque as the video continues.  But mostly the video is Gavin Rossdale's beautifully lit alabaster face in its best Jordan Catallano-like grimace of earnestness intercut with a half-clothed contorted woman, also alabaster, who doesn't get to have a face.  Only Gavin, with his scarecrow/pit crew peasant suit and his shoulder-length locks and pearl necklace, gets a face. It's a video based entirely on a mimetic type of intimacy: We swim in his face so we must know, he really means this song. Sadly, Gavin is no Sinead and can't do that single tear thing, nor does he compel you to watch him through four minutes of stillness.  Though he looks pretty trying.

Kevin Kerslake directed "Glycerine" who also directed Nirvana's "Come as You Are" video.  Whereas Glycerine gives us pure alabaster Rossdale face that the camera keeps trying to crawl into because we must see it so badly, Kurt Cobain's image in Kerslake's Nirvana video is constantly distorted and refracted.  Neither videos are great by any means (Compare for yourself:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vabnZ9-ex7o --- Kerslake really loves his artsy b-reel footage)  But they do seem to capture their subjects as their subjects seem to want to be captured--either trying really hard or trying hard not to try at all.  His best work is the video for Mazzy Star's "Fade into You" precisely for the degree to which he leans into the song's faded feel.  You don't even have to watch it to imagine what it looks like. Yeah, it looks just like that.  

Alot of videos in the 90s looked like "Glycerine."  And I'm as interested in the videos we remember as the ones we may have forgotten--I want to consider the music video idiom in all its shaggy-haired acoustic blandness.  You know what they say: for every Missy Elliot's Da Rain there are a million Glycerines.  It's Bush that spawned the Creeds to come, not just sonically but visually.  See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99j0zLuNhi8.  

Fun facts:  

Bush had three other members besides Gavin Rossdale!  lest you think Bush was like a NIN's situation where it's really just one dude, it wasn't!  In fact, if you freeze the video at 1:25 you can see one of these Others illuminated in between lightening flashes.  Were these bandmembers extremely untelegenic?  Did they know Gavin had a face of smooth alabaster and decided to let him just go for it? I guess this video could have been more cello-centric then it is, so here's too restraint?

Wikipedia says this about the "Glycerine" video:  "Though simple and unadorned, the video was highly acclaimed and won several awards, including the MTV Video Music Award - Viewer's Choice as well nominated for Best Alternative Video at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards." I'm not sure how winning a MTV Viewer's Choice award is enough to say a video has won "high acclaim."  Though, their track record is better than I would have guessed:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV_Video_Music_Award_-_Viewer%27s_Choice

Highlights: Whatever it is that starts happening at the end around 4:07 when the cello starts getting weird and the background silhouettes/band members start flailing around Thom Yorke style

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Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiinng!  - Native Son

Like that other famous opening alerting its audience it's now time to WAKE UP, (Do The Right Thing aside) "1st of Tha Month" opens with a bang, or a Brrrrrriiinnnnng to be precise.  But this early brash realist touch is the last one for this video.   Referencing the collective mixture of relief and on-goingness on the day when welfare checks get issued,  "1st of da Month's" A-plot is standard pre-Puffy 90s bbq fodder ala Nuthin but a G-Thang; but it's the B-plot that gets at the weird genius that is Bone Thugs N Harmony, the MOST IMPORTANT RAP GROUP OF THE 1990s (more on this later somewhere on this blog, one day, not here though). 

 Bone Thugs were the remainder of the horror-core hip-hop scene that never really was, their gothic sounds capable of being simultaneously abrasive and soothing like eerie hood lullabies.   Like DMX, Bone Thugs was not a group all that interested in name brands or bitches.  If DMX was the snarling psychopath ready to snap from neglect, Bone Thugs were too damn high for all that shit.  The song itself basically describes a (quite boring) day in the life of a dope slinger (the song's last line sums it up-- "get live with the Bone Thugs, Poetic Hustlers on the graveyard shift on the 1st.")  Though Chris Rock described "1st of Da Month"  as a "welfare carol" in his infamous "Black People vs. Niggers" routine, nothing too great or celebratory happens on this day of all days.  You can finally get your hair braided and the corner is a little more hopping, but that's about it.  The song is both exuberant and mournful, and this is the line BTs walk with such delicacy and intrigue, like the hip-hop monks they are.

 I'd be lying if I said I understand the B-plot of this video completely.  Tonally, it's Eisenstein meets Miss Cleo.  Trying to describe it makes its oddness even more manifold:  The Bone Thugs each take turns holding a fortune teller's ball, through which they see a Generic White Capitalist (GWC for short) who is reading a newspaper, which becomes a portal to a bustling check-cashing place.  The GWC's desk mat then becomes yet another portal, peering down upon a homeless man.  GWC pulls out bills from his suit jacket and drops it through the desk mat/portal to make it rain on the homeless man, before pulling out his handy hand broom (?) and literally sweeping him away.  And then GWC's door becomes yet another portal, this time hosting a black woman and child praying, a portal he quickly locks.  Finally, the GWC reopens his newspaper, sees the Bone Thugs, and throws it away.  Meanwhile, the logo on the Bone Thugs hats is increasingly engulfed in flames, so they look like swamis on fire.  Unpack that.

Eric Meza directed this video, who also did many of Public Enemy and N.W.A's videos, accounting for what I think may be a parody of trickle down economics in between the party and bullshit vibe of the other part of the video.  Meza, perhaps recognizing the Native Son analogue with the song's opening alarm clock, stuffs the video with Native Son's other trademarks--newspapers that track you, haunting scenes of black precarity.  But the song itself is less naturalist spectacle then a quiet ode to everyday survival.  Less dramatic than Ice Cube's "Today Was a Good Day" where that day's exceptional lack of violence is constantly marked by Cube with surprise, "1st of Da Month" never earnestly expresses surprise or even relief.  The song may start with an alarm clock but it never wakes up.  We stay in their haze of weed and hustling, a sleepiness that even the 1st day of month fails to really puncture or punctuate.  While the GWC tries to sweep both the good and bad aspects of black life offscreen, Bone Thugs sits with all of it, making melodic malaise.

Highlights:

2:13, where Bone Thugs N Harmony gets literal!  Peep the skeleton in the afro in the background.

3:12  the handbroom is out, sweep sweep sweep.

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The music video is my favorite art form of all time (sorry books), so I'm going to try to post some reflections on ones I think need either more seeing or reflecting upon.  And in between I'll just write about other music-y things. That's it.