Monday, April 6th, 2009 // Paperhouse
Tonight, I spun the clickwheel of my iPod until “Ride Around Shining” by Clipse came up. Upon its release, the song and the album that housed it sparked a debate among the Internet cognoscenti about its ethics, or lack thereof.
Was Hell Hath No Fury a nuanced treatment of the drug trade’s moral complexities or a raw glorification of crack and the cash that came of it?
I never really took a side in that argument — the ruthlessness of the production transfixed me more than the cold-hearted consumerism of the lyrics.
Returning to the song, nearly two years later, it seems unsettlingly prescient. It’s as if Clipse knew, in the summer of ’07, that the housing bubble was overdue for bursting, and that the economy, a year and a half down the road, would be stumbling and desperate, like a crack addict caught in Virginia Beach traffic (of two kinds). “All I wanna do is ride around shinin’ while I can afford it” — did they know?
Listening to the song today, it’s hard to say if the cloud of detuned piano that hovers over the minimal beat presages collapses or confirms it.
Is that miasma of notes the tremor that says “earthquake,” or the dust of crushed concrete settling after disaster has already come? Are Clipse a pair of fortunetellers or funeral directors?
The song, like its creators, seems caught between violent scenes. Virginia Beach rappers aren’t dirty South and they aren’t New York. They’re coastal, smooth, but never as glib as Snoop and Dre.
They wouldn’t fit in Los Angeles. They rap in suspension, with the devil-may-care edge of a parolee speeding past the police station in a stolen convertible.
A decade that started with a hyped crisis that never materialized (Y2K) is ending with an economic crisis borne of over-hyped material (toxic securities).
For this author, “Ride Around Shining” is the anthem that captures the spirit of those two endpoints, as it cruises on a vaporous chassis, grille gleaming, right between them.
-Split Foster
Monday, March 2nd, 2009 // Paperhouse
Dear Arthur Russell,
Let’s pretend it didn’t happen. That it just… didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good documentary and all. I enjoyed the whole thing — the flannel, the fluorescence, the frustration. Your parents and boyfriend are adorable and the clips of you playing guitar in that puffy winter jacket — black and white bliss, my man. But I’d rather wipe the mnemonic slate clean.
Let’s pretend that I’ve never known anything about you, that my first and last encounters with you are Another Thought spinning humbly in the dark. That I know nothing of your beatnik exodus from Iowa, nothing of your camaraderie with Allen Ginsburg, nothing of your disco prowess, nothing of AIDS, nothing of nothing. That all I know, not just of you, but of the whole world, is this supine posture — lying face up — is this cello echoing and squealing into the shadows, is your voice lilting and reverberant, sure as soft cotton on bleeding skin.
Let’s pretend that there is a city even Italo Calvino, the famous writer, hasn’t conjured, one where your lyrics are law, where your melodies are weather, where your atmospheres are public housing policy, where your four-track is the key to the courthouse. Let’s pretend I’m bedding down in the tenement of your sadness and hope. Let’s pretend the headline of the “Russell Daily Register” says “Lucky cloud in your sky, Brother.”
Let’s pretend I still listen to music more than I catalog it. “The birth of the moment is never ending.” Let’s pretend I believe that because it’s you saying it, singing it in loops of noise. Voltaire said that the only things too stupid to be said are sung. I want to be stupid with you.
Let’s pretend it’s the ghosts who have to believe in us for us to be real. Let’s pretend it’s you listening to me. Let’s pretend it’s you reading this letter, you smoothing the creases of this with your palms, you smearing newsprint into the whorls on your fingertips.
This is how we walk on the moon.
-Split Foster
Monday, February 23rd, 2009 // Paperhouse
One of the reasons I adore ambient music is that it can draw your attention to a whole medley of sounds whirring along in otherwise complacent spaces. To capitalize on this ability of ambient music to sensitize listeners to sounds they usually ignore, I’ve invented a game. It’s called “We peeled the wallpaper from Brian Eno’s skull and guess what we found? A crude pencil sketch of your brother performing a carnal act with the neighbor girl! On top of an oscillator!”
Rules:
All players must listen to at least one recording from any of the following: Stars of the Lid, Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Potpie, Belong, and/or Stephen Vitiello.
Players find rooms in which nothing is happening. Players must identify as many discrete sounds audible within the room as possible, write a short description of each sound and enumerate it.
Player with the most sounds identified at the end of a half-hour wins.
Here are the results of my first round:
A clock shaped like a soda cracker ticks and tocks above the sink.
The neighbor’s wind chime jangling. Sounds like car keys.
A cyclical warbling sound. Source: unidentified. My first guess — overhead lights in the kitchen — was wrong.
The sound from the fan on the back of my laptop, which occasionally reaches a pneumatic intensity evocative of airplane engines, thanks to the fact that said laptop is old and infested with myriad species of malware.
The refrigerator. A very humble humming.
The 500 bus line runs just a block behind the Family Dollar that’s in my backyard, so occasionally a bus glides past and I hear the woman’s voice announcing the name of the line with the weird, Stephen Hawking-ish elocution that occurs when words are pasted together from separate recordings of their constituent phonemes, e.g. “Five. Hun/dred.”
Treble gurgling in the radiators along the floorboards.
The cat, when he wakes up, is very whiny. So his meowing…
And scratching at the door so he can go down to the basement and smell that spot in the paint closet where the neighbor’s cat urinated — copiously — last week….
And crunching of the last remaining bits of his Purina Kit ’n Kaboodle.
-Split Foster
