Friday, June 05, 2009 - Posts
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Stirred by Mr. Agger's call for scoops on cultural sorbet—records that tune up dulled ears, movies that refresh tired eyes, and so on—I spelunked into the den and grabbed the Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Stein-ese blasts the mind clean of caked-on verbal gunk. "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense," she once said. To cope, she cultivated her own sense of sense, in a sense. The book falls open to her portrait of Picasso: "This one was one who was working and certainly this one was needing to be working so as to be one being working. This one was one having something coming out of him." There is structure, and there is cadence, and that is that.
Discovering practical applications for her radical grammar, Stein babbles as clear as a brook. In the last section of the memoir Wars I Have Seen, titled "The Coming of the Americans," she thrills at meeting the first Americans to arrive in Culoz, her adopted home, after the liberation of France. On the occasion of the 65th anniversary of D-Day, check the breeze of its final paragraph. It would be almost unpatriotic not to dig it.
How we talked that night, they just brought all America to us every bit of it, they came from Colorado, lovely Colorado, I do not know Colorado but that is the way I felt about it lovely Colorado and then everybody was tired out and they gave us nice American specialties and my were we happy, we were, completely and truly happy and completely and entirely worn out with emotion. The next morning while they breakfasted we talked some more and we patted each other and then kissed each other and then they went away. Just as we were sitting down to lunch, in came four more Americans this time war correspondents, our emotions were not yet exhausted nor our capacity to talk, how we talked and talked and where they were born was music to the ears Baltimore and Washington D.C. and Detroit and Chicago, it is all music to the ears so long long long away from the names of the places where they were born. Well they have asked me to go with them to Voiron to broadcast with them to America next Sunday and I am going and the war is over and this certainly this is the last war to remember.
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The very day I began vegetable gardening—a day on which I began to heal the split between what I think and what I do; in which I commingled my identity as producer and citizen—I drove down the Taconic Parkway, picked up my Sunday Times, and read Michael Pollan's essay exhorting 2 million like-minded Bobos to take up gardening to "heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen."
This weekend I'm going to drive up the Taconic and find out how my seedlings fared—tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, etc.—their first week out of peat pots and in the soil. I don't especially care that I'm a cliché; you can't, after all, hand someone a copy of Catcher in the Rye, then tell them they don't have to go through adolescence. But I garden with Pollan as a near-constant hypothetical adversary. Consider some themes from Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: overproduction to the point of glut; the alienating power of the commodity; the tendency of laissez-faire to crush the small producer by monopoly fiat.
All very nice. But why have the social hopes of the left devolved onto the consumer choices of the lone individual, with a peculiarly intense focus on eating? So long as the choice is individual and free, my neighbor is also free to choose; to choose to drive a 4,000-lb. leisure vehicle a quarter-mile to eat a Big Mac. Il faut cultiver notre jardin—"We must cultivate our own garden"—is the last sentence of Voltaire's Candide, a weary assertion on behalf of severely delimited autonomy in an otherwise hopelessly fucked-up world. I often think about it as I spade and hoe and commingle my identities.
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The rapper who vows to leave rap behind for more exciting territory has become something of a cliché. We've seen this play out from the space-freak experiments of Andre 3000 and Cee-Lo to the rock and synth-pop aspirations of Lil Wayne and Kanye West to the (short-lived) retirement of Jay-Z. The motive here is easy enough to guess at: Rappers grow older and grow bored with hip-hop's sometimes-rigid thematic and formal limits. Besides, what better brag is there than announcing that you are bigger than your entire genre?
This narrative overlaps, though, with another, less glamorous cliché: That of the rapper who grows too old to be convincing anymore. All of pop music is steeped in youth, but rockers and chanteuses have found paths to dignified, relevant pastures that have still eluded most rappers. (Jay-Z's post-retirement albums, Kingdom Come and American Gangster, came at this quagmire from different angles, neither with total success.)
Ghostface Killah is the latest MC to address aging in hip-hop—this time in the context of the recession—giving a colorful quote to Unkut magazine about his decision to focus more heavily on R & B than rap with his next record:
[E]verybody don't sell crack no more, man. I don't sell crack, yo. I ain't movin' no bricks or none of that other shit. I ain't shoot nobody in like ... since the early ‘90s, man. How long you gonna be 40 years old and actin' like you still sellin' cracks and you on the block and you doin' this and you doin' that when times is more serious, man. We in a fuckin' recession, B! Ain't nobody gettin' no money, man! We gotta stop lyin' to ourselves and lyin' to the fans. And the fans gotta stop bein' so dumb and ignorant, and know it's time to talk about grown-man situations. Shit that happen in the real life, inside your household, your love life, your personal life, that's just like, "Damn, it's hard for a nigga to get some money!"
This is not entirely new ground for Ghostface Killah (who has already proved that he could transition brilliantly into children's music if he wanted). To hear the closest thing hip-hop has produced to a Johnny Cash moment—a haunting, rageful, invigorating tussle with the gloaming—grab a copy of 8 Diagrams, the largely overlooked last album by Ghostface's crew, the Wu-Tang Clan.
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