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[jake-bittle]

Reaching Across the Dimensions

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse

I have never found much consolation in the theory of reality that posits there are infinitely many universes, together containing all the possibilities of existence. If there were infinitely many universes, then each one would have to be infinitesimally small, indistinguishable from a cloud of neighboring universes almost exactly like it. They would almost cease to be universes at all, which is maybe the point. But I know my universe, and I know it is a universe. When I close my eyes for the night I can hear it continuing to hum without me. When I pace through it by daylight I can sense its definitions, apprehend all that it is and most of what it is not. Why should I care how many others there are?

Yet the facts of the multiverse, so uninteresting to me as scientific reality, become more compelling when they appear in fiction. This is perhaps because in art, alternate universes are always summoned in service of narrative, which is probably the only continuum more powerful than that of spacetime. In a work of art that “literally” depicted the multiverse, nothing would seem more or less real or important than anything else. Nothing would happen because nothing would not happen. But in a story about these things, all the possibilities of quantum foam are folded into one universe, this universe. In such a narrative alternate universes exist to deliver the characters what usually comes to them as a benediction from God or not at all: possibility, the real and boundless possibility of redemption, love, unity, etc. The “alternate universe” becomes a metaphor for the world of our imagination, the way we would like things to be.

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse is ostensibly a movie about such possibilities, but it’s actually much more than that. In the movie, the “real” Spiderman is slain by the villain in the first five minutes, his demise observed by a kid from Brooklyn named Miles who coincidentally also got bit by a radioactive spider the day before. But it’s okay that Spiderman 1 is dead, because the villain, Kingpin, has just opened up a Thunderdome-sized portal into the multiverse, through which arrive one other Spiderman and four Spiderpeople from the seemingly infinite—yes—comic book spinoffs that have appeared over the years.

The movie is about how these six Spiderpeople successfully stop Kingpin from turning on the portal again and destroying New York in the process. The alien Spiderpeople then return to their respective universes and Miles take up the mantle of Spiderman in Universe 1, a welcome transition since the previous guy not only looked positively Aryan but was, we learn, also enrolled as a grad student. The multiverse thing, Miles tells us almost explicitly at the end, is supposed to serve as consolation to every bullied preteen and comic-book fan from a rough upbringing: there exists a universe in which you are Spiderman. You’ll never get to see that universe, but it “exists.” The appearance of the other Spideys represents a kind of transdimensional fulfillment of one’s desire to be lifted out of one’s problems. In this world you will have trouble, but take heart, for I have overcome the worlds.

But what’s beautiful about this movie is that, even as it pretends to rely on the multiverse for its message, it’s doing something very different.  Miles becomes Spiderman before the wormhole, when he accidentally gets bit by a spider while doing graffiti on the subway with his uncle. What’s the difference between an act of fate that comes from without this dimension and one that comes from within it? If there is a difference, it must be infinitesimally small. The love interest is treated in a similar way: Spiderwoman Gwen, played by Hailee Steinfeld and sent from a universe with better gender politics, appears at Miles’s school a week before the portal opens, dislodged in time to serve the needs of the plot. This gives she and Miles just enough waking hours to develop innocent crushes on each other before Gwen has to go back to her own universe, or else she’ll glitch out and die. The movie hints that they can still communicate via a sort of fourth-dimensional Facetime, but one only assumes Miles will move on eventually. This in its own way is a statement about possibility and Possibility.

Even Kingpin’s motivation calls into question the surface-level conceit. His goal in opening the wormhole is not to kill all New Yorkers (or half of them, thank you for asking) but to get back his wife and son, who were killed years ago in a car accident as they tried to walk out on him. He just really wants his family back, and is willing to endanger a whole city to get them. Just as Spiderverse, in a universe where Disney didn’t own the copyright, could make a wonderful title for a postmodern novel, Kingpin’s motivations in another movie could be seen as positively noble. A man tries to bend the spacetime continuum in order to be reunited with his family—does that sound familiar? It’s the plot of Interstellar. Matthew McConaughey is lucky he wasn’t endangering any cities as he scrolled through the Library of the Universe, but if he had been, would we have expected him to care? But the movie offers Kingpin as a more realistic lesson, one grounded in this universe: you were lucky to have been born into a reality that is decent enough despite its problems, so don’t bite the hand that feeds. (Unless you are a spider and your bite can give me powers.)

By the same token, where is the agony when SpiderGwen leaves Miles for her universe? Yes, they’ve only known each other for two days, but Dante only saw Beatrice once or twice before he wrote all those poems about her, and stories have been imagined based on more tenuous connections. But that’s what makes the movie good: it goes only so far with the multiverse thing, and no further. Even the possibilities of the infinite are limited, and Miles has to close the portal and get back to “real life,” whatever that is.

He can do this because he’s 12 years old, but we wiser beings cannot. We wait our whole lives for a taste from another dimension, whether we are separated from that dimension by material space, extradimensional fabric, or the distance of time. If you squint a little, a lot of great novels look like multiverse stories, just ones that are content to offer their characters half-formed visions of the Beyond rather than throw them into fight scenes with their alternate-universe counterparts. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is one such book: it’s a story about six seemingly unrelated lives across five centuries that turn out to be somehow supernaturally intertwined, linked just strongly enough for each character to get the fleeting sense that their world was somehow created by a past version of themselves, and that they create the world for a future version.

The book is subtle about this, nesting the six stories inside each other in matryoshka formation and leaving the reader to imagine the pain of knowing that someone is out there, decades away, but being unable to reach them. We don’t even really know if the characters are reincarnations of each other or what. The movie, which I liked except for the part where Tom Hanks plays an Asian guy, is way more obvious, but in a way that also works. Sixsmith, the composer of the “Cloud Atlas” symphony, tells his lover that “there are whole movements I wrote imagining us meeting over and over again in different lives.” This line, like Miles and Gwen’s parting fist-bump, moved me almost to tears when I saw it: the distance between the pairs in both cases again seems like a metaphor for the distance between the real world and the possible.

When Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time takes a bite of his madeleine cookie and feels all the memories of his childhood rushing back to him, what else is he experiencing but contact with a kind of localized multiverse? But just as it’s very difficult to open a transdimensional wormhole on purpose, such bursts of memory can never be summoned at will, which is what makes them so powerful. This is why the multiverse collider in Spiderverse isn’t harnessed and donated to MIT Laboratories, which would have been something like the awful decision to have the protagonist teach the alien language at the end of Arrival. Contact with the Beyond cannot be sustainable. I may bite a cookie and find that my childhood town, “taking its proper shapes and growing solid, springs into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea,” but these phantasms must fade eventually so I can talk to my mom. Our new crush always vanishes into the mouth of a wormhole. And at the end of every dream, no matter how long and how vivid, we wake up and find ourselves pawing the air for a reality that existed moments ago but now does not. (Or still does, but somewhere else.)

[jake-bittle]

Takeoff — “The Last Rocket”

Takeoff has always been my favorite Migo. He and I have a lot in common—we’re both younger than most of our friends, uglier than most of our friends, and way more interested than most of our friends in the principles of poetic meter.  Take “Too Hotty,” for instance, with its extreme dactyls—I had no choice to get up and go get it but I heard that you had the option to. Or something slower like “Slippery,” where he uses those strong trochees: dead shot, A K make your head rock. More than almost any other rapper working today, he really appreciates the power of syllables as an end unto themselves—he just loves making sounds with his mouth, and you can hear that whenever he raps.

Seriously, I spent years scanning poetry in college and this stuff really checks out—his use of meter really does remind me the most formal of English-language poets. The biggest difference is the subject matter. Compare this, for instance, from Gerard Manley Hopkins:

...then off, off forth on swing,  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding        rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

with this from “Insomnia”:

I fuck her one time, I know she gon' come back around  I been gettin' that paper way back in the day but this shit gettin' crazy now

Notice how they both extend that second line out way past where it’s supposed to go, and how he (Takeoff) messes with your expectations for both the length and the locus of the stress on the third and fourth line. 

In Takeoff’s verses as in Hopkins’s, the author’s actions, thoughts, beliefs, and biography are all of only secondary importance, and other people figure hardly at all. For Hopkins the only important thing is God, while for Takeoff it’s whatever debauchery lends itself best in the moment to depiction in an avalanche of monosyllables—you decide which you prefer, but you should know that no one reads Hopkins to get his take on the resurrection.

I have to say, though, I was worried that Takeoff’s album might be just as exhausting as Quavo’s, considering especially that he sounds so forceful when he’s intervening on another voice in a full Migos song—the Quavo hook ends, you hear that lupine, raspy voice jump in, and all of a sudden he’s rapping faster than you can follow. It’s like when they jump to hyperspace in Star Wars and all the stars get smeared on the window—which, I should note, sounds kinda like a Takeoff lyric about a drop-top car. Fortunately, though, the length here is a conservative 38 minutes, and though there’s only one feature from a scatterbrained Quavo (I would say they left it off his album, but I don’t think they left anything off that album), the whole thing feels fresh. Granted, songs like “I Remember” and “Lead The Wave” are instant deep cuts, but they each have thirty seconds or so of lyrical brilliance—like a Takeoff verse with a lot of parenthetical padding.

The main consequence of a solo album like this is that we get to know more about Takeoff as a person. This isn’t always a good thing: in “Casper,” for instance, over an all-too-familiar flute beat, he asks himself the question, “What do I want to do today?” On his way to figuring that out, he ejaculates on a woman’s face and tells her to shut up. At last he reveals the answer: “Decided what I’m gonna do today: I’ma ghost-ride the Wraith.” Surprise! Elsewhere, though, hearing more from him is welcome, as on “Infatuation,” where a dreamy two-minute intro precedes a single romantic verse that’s all the more convincing for being delivered in a voice like Takeoff’s. On “Bruce Wayne,” the final track, T concludes a great verse about being the least-appreciated Migo with a reminiscence about almost vomiting the first time he stepped on stage, something I’ve only ever heard one other rapper talk about.

Really, though, the best songs are the ones where the subject matter takes a backseat to the flow itself, like “Vacation,” where he pronounces Europe “yurp,” or “None to Me,” which may be the most acrobatic verbal performance I’ve heard from a rapper this year:

Every time my life get a pop, make me wanna drop somethin' Like lookin' at my money stacked, that's why the whip I ain't bought one Not that I can't get one, or not that I don't want one So booked, if I even got it, I wouldn't have time to drive one Thinking about that LaFerrari, bout to go and find one Had a dream about a Sky-Dweller, then I woke up and went and bought one The feelin' ain't the same, can't explain if you ain't got one

It’s incredible how he piles up single-syllable words until they become something more than the sum of their parts, like a DNA chain. Picture this really stoic guy getting ushered into the studio, opening his mouth, and presumably letting loose until they tell him to stop. He’s savantish, he’s logorrheic—he loves words. He’s like Rae Armantrout or something, except one can’t imagine Armantrout had a voice like this.

[jake-bittle]

Carly Rae Jepsen — “Party for One”

The late-millennial Robyn, probably, but she’s never sounded more like Katy Perry than she does here. The vocals are unremarkable, surprisingly, but that’s not the point. The point is that happiness and sadness, experienced simultaneously, make each other more vivid, not less. This is an emotional thesis Carly has demonstrated more consistently than anyone since Fleetwood Mac, and she does it again here, and it works like it always does.  This isn’t the most impressive song technically or lyrically, but it’s still twenty times more interesting than “Cut to the Feeling,” which I maintain was cut at the last minute from the soundtrack of an animated children’s movie. And the breakdown that starts around 2:20, more “Robocop” than “Run Away With Me,” is just kickass. Welcome back.

[jake-bittle]

Robyn — “Honey”

“Dancing On My Own” must be one of the best songs of all time—it really does feel like the song makes objective as music an intangible, psychological state, actually doing in the 2000s what every art critic in the 1800s thought art was supposed to do. The song captures the experience it describes in the same way ice represents the “capture” of water—it just is the thing, not a depiction of the thing. It’s rare for a pop artist’s most successful songs to be their best, but that’s the case with Robyn—“Dancing,” as well as “Call Your Girlfriend,” and now “Missing U” and “Honey,” are destined to stand as her most popular songs, but they’re also her most powerful, and everyone knows it. That plaintive singer-songwriter croon, transfixed by that Eurotrance vibration, seeming to connote at once paralysis and supersonic velocity—only she can do that, and she’s never done anything as powerful.

But with great power comes great responsibility, and in this case the responsibility of conservatism. That’s why Honey is anchored around its three incarnations of this splendid aesthetic, and why the tracks in between function either as bathetic reprieves from the main songs (who since Lil Wayne has sounded less convincing when they say “I’m a human being”?) or preludes giving the moments of ecstasy their proper context. Case in point would be the transition from “Baby Forgive Me” to “Send to Robin Immediately” (one of the funniest song titles of the year) to the sublime “Honey.” In the first song you can already hear the pulse of “Honey,” but it’s very muted, and “Send to Robin” weaves the lyrics of “Baby Forgive Me” into a beat that suggests the coming melody in even stronger terms. 

After the climax, she’s smart enough not to try for that same visionary regret again, but rather gives us two sorta silly songs: “Between The Lines,” made sexy by the presence of that froggy male interlocutor, and the hilarious, cringe-y “Beach2k20,” which I don’t really like, but I’m not saying isn’t good. It’s just hard to be convinced by what’s essentially a feminist version of the “we got some Puerto Rican girls” interlude from the Rolling Stones’s “Some Girls,” and if Drake isn’t allowed to sing about Instagram followers at 31, then Robyn cannot say “come thru” as she crests 40.

About the title track itself, what more is there to say? She got it right. It never really starts and never really ends, and you lose yourself inside it. The gasping synths create an atmosphere so ethereal that it takes a couple listens to notice how physical the lyrics are—saliva, current, etc. It will endure for hundreds of years. “Missing U” and “Ever Again” are less cutting, but they’re still wonderful, and I just love the oft-deployed ploy of ending a pop album with a rhetorical gesture toward eternity, toward endless love. Even though most pop songs are about desire, and most desire manifests as pain, it’s nice to be reminded every now and then of what we’re working at when we fall in love, whether we know as much or not—forever, forever-ever.

[jake-bittle]

Jeremih and Ty Dolla $ign — “MihTy”

You already knew this album was going to be about sex, but in case you didn’t, the first song opens with Ty Dolla $ign saying, “Let’s have seeeeeexxx.” Then, two songs later, like Tristram Shandy restarting the narrative of his own life, he adds, “I’m fucking you toniiiiiight,” and Jeremih comes in again on the next song to clarify: “Hands on your bahhhdayyy.” 

And so on and so on, to the exclusion of nearly all other worldly events and objects: “the Wraith,” familiar to all listeners of hip-hop, makes a prominent appearance on the remarkably realistic car-sex jam “Ride It,” but we don’t even get a reference to the mai tai of the punny title. It’s all about boning, and boy, can these guys sing about that, perhaps because they believe the act is of nearly universal benefit to the woman getting boned—she’s being “put in the light,” for instance, or “put on that level,” or needs to be banged because she’s “going through some thangz.” We’ll never hear from these women to find out, obviously, so we have to take these two at their drawn-out wooo-hurrrrrrrd. 

We already knew from Beach House and Free TC that Ty Dolla $ign had endurance, but Jeremih has always seemed to me more of a singles guy, though maybe that’s not fair. They both have staying power on this collaborative album—and why so many of these nowadays?—but the appeal here is not so much their chemistry as the way they each perform so well in 90-second increments. Yes, they occasionally harmonize with one another, but they might as well be wandering through a corn maze singing, each ignorant of the other’s presence. If anything these songs serve to highlight how different they are as singers, not only in terms of vocal tenor but also in the way they describe women—Ty offers his muses the slavering, lumbering feedback of a color football commentator, while there’s an almost Dexter’s Laboratory quality to Jeremih’s interest in the female anatomy. It comes to same thing in the end, though.

I’m not a fan of the first or second song here—the first is too afraid of melody, the second shouldn’t have that trap beat. But the run of “FYT” to the fantastic, ever-morphing “Surrounded” (one of the only tracks on here where Jeremih is the MVP) is just amazing—two-minute track lengths are just perfect for these guys, because the songs end right as you really start to sense how delectable the soundscape is, and then it’s on to the next song. “Perfect Timing” and “These Days” are such bangers, scrumptious without being demanding or flamboyant. You know what you’re going to get with each one, but at the same time there’s always something a little unexpected about the self-satisfied lust of an excessively held syllable leaving either of these guys’ lips. You can’t believe how content they are to just fuck, fuck, and fuck again, and that makes something squirm in your stomach, in a happy way. It’s worth clarifying what we mean when we talk about “guilty pleasures,” of which this album is one—that is, we always mean guilty for us, because it’s never guilty for them.

[jake-bittle]

Future and JuiceWRLD — “WRLD ON DRUGS”

I’m old enough to remember that when What a Time to Be Alive came out in 2015, everyone who was already too cool for Drake praised Future’s lyrics for being “dark” and “deep” where Drake’s were frivolous. Ooh, listen, he drank so much lean he thought he might die! Well, times change, and three years later Future has been displaced as “the emo one” by someone called Juice WRLD. Now Mr. Hendrix is the aged normie and Juice is the emotional one who makes occasional suicide references.

Except there isn’t much that distinguishes Juice WRLD as a rapper, aside perhaps from his questionable understanding of female anatomy—he cannot seem to decide whether a vagina is for jumping in, or swimming in, or beating up and murdering viciously, or (and I quote) kissing goodnight. Yes, “Lucid Dreams” is a good song, but doesn’t Lil Uzi Vert cannibalize pop-punk well enough? Do we really need another one of these guys? And for that matter, does the new guy really have to do an hourlong collaborative album with Future?

Allegedly recorded in less than a week (the era of “we doing 300 records a day” has never really ended), this stone soup of leftovers and single-takes is almost uniformly forgettable. “Astronauts”, “Different”, “Shorty”—did the world really need to hear these? Or if we did, could we at least have waited until both artists were dead? The cast of feature artists, apparently composed of whoever was available last Thursday between 3pm and 5pm, does little to break up the monotony; Young Thug is on autopilot and you’d really think Nicki Minaj was above this stuff by now. Aside from “Realer N Realer,” driven by a fabulous Wheezy beat, and the future Future deep cut “Afterlife” (“All the love I got for Atlanta, I got the same for Chiraq”), there’s nothing worth keeping here. If “Jet Lag” comes on in the club, I’ll probably enjoy it.

But even beyond being unremarkable, this tape is occasionally unlistenable: what, for instance, is the idea behind the title track with a beat that sounds like it was made by accident on a children’s Casio keyboard? “World on drugs, can you give me some”—you almost wish these guys had never heard of drugs. And don’t even get me started on the onerous “7AM Freestyle,” which feels about 45 minutes long, or “Oxy,” on which Wayne sounds halfway in the grave and Future reprises the screechy “la di da di da” voice from “King’s Dead.”  Epic Records desperately needs to fire whichever of Future’s lunatic assistants keeps telling him to do that screechy voice, because it’s not cute. It almost makes you pine for the voice of Juice WRLD, a rapper whose most interesting quality is that he can do a pretty good Max Bemis impression. I never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather just listen to Lil Baby.

[jake-bittle]

Khalid — “Suncity”

The Sun Belt has always been a fascinating place to me. I’ve never been there, but I find appealing the idea that postwar America marched out into these grand deserts and laid down the same old suburban society as before, recreating the same love, the same forms of aging, the same domestic anguish that generations of families who lived on treelined cul-de-sacs in New England had to endure.

Suncity, the new EP from the perennially underrated balladeer Khalid, who hails from El Paso, clearly pays homage to just this strangeness of the Sun Belt. Its twenty minutes skulk up and down the lanes of suburbs built on the edge of blasted landscapes. Between you and the big canyon beyond sits the house where your girl lives, and you’re waiting for her to come out. There is no actual geography in the songs, sure, but just look at that cookie-cutter house on the cover, likely erected for $45 and in about thirty minutes, or think about the title, or listen to the intro wherein Khalid receives the keys to the city of El Paso, which, you know, good for him. One hesitates to argue that an album of five real songs could have any anchoring “concept,” and yet the muted lust of all five is evidently the lust of a desert-dweller, someone with nothing to do except rollick in his own feelings. How would your emotional life be different if in order to get from your planned community to your crush’s you had to drive thirty minutes in the dark past, like, mesas?

The implied emptiness around all Khalid’s feelings is captured best by the fluttering languor of the first track, “Vertigo.” The fake strings bleed out to his voice, almost croaking an opening verse exhausted as it is inquisitive, and we’re totally Khalid’s. How can you not find this beautiful? You can tell he listened one too many times to A$AP Rocky’s “LSD” before getting to the studio, because that song’s background wails and resonant drums are mimicked to a T here, but this song succeeds where “LSD” fails because all that’s on display is the normal awkwardness of a teen trying and failing to explain himself—none of that hippy-dippy shit. “I’ve been learning, I’ve been growing / But the worst is yet to come,” he tells us, and how are we supposed to feel about this? This is optimism’s skulduggery, the extravagant pointlessness of the Sun Belt. And then, “Eyes closed, eyes closed / I been falling with my eyes low,” and the song doesn’t end so much as disintegrate. 

The next one, “Saturday Nights,” is another stunner, a sort of spiritual successor to “Super Rich Kids.” There’s a narrative here about Khalid ridiculing his girlfriend’s family drama, but the real anchor is the way he sings the chorus—“All the things I know that your parents don’t...they don’t care like I do”—over those simplistic guitars. It sounds like an audacious thing for him to say, maybe even rude, but think back to when you first realized you first discovered you could forge bonds with friends or lovers that might end up stronger than your ties to your literal family. He can’t help but love that he knows things her parents don’t, and I’m sure he does feel that he cares about her more than them. It’s probably for her, not us, to decide whether he’s right. 

Afterward we get a pretty-but-pretty-boring electronic track called “Motion” that can’t help but succumb halfway through to the spectacular melody of the next song, “Better,” my personal fave. His voice works so well here with the unadulterated (pun intended) yearning of the lyrics. Raspy, wistful, patient—you imagine it’s what we all sound like when the lights are off and the bowl is cashed, if we had anyone to talk to. You say we’re just friends, but I swear, when nobody’s around...swear what? Doesn’t matter. The closing track, “Suncity,” is just a brighter depiction of this same desire. Listen to the sultry power he squeezes into those short syllables in “corazon”—I don’t care if he’s an industry plant or a Miguel clone, that’s a powerful voice.

Pitchfork says listening to Khalid’s music “feels like settling,” but life itself feels like settling, unless maybe you get to write for Pitchfork, so I’ll go ahead and say that feeling is there on purpose. You don’t get a voice as hoarse as Khalid’s without not getting what you want at least some of the time. Plus, what exactly are we giving up by “settling” for his music, even if it turns out in a couple years that he’s only capable of capturing two to five different emotions? These songs are sexy, they’re beautiful, they give me shivers, they make me feel like I’m doing 80 on a sagebrush freeway even when I’m sitting on the toilet in Bushwick. Nothing feels better than this.