“With a faith at the size of a seed enough to be redeemed”

“The messiah will come only when his is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival [….]” -Franz Kafka

Introduction

It’s arguable that there has always been a “messianic” complex within rap music. Since it’s inception at the end of the 1970s, MCs have claimed the mantel of “the greatest”, or, alternately, the one who will save the music from those who speak falsely in its name. As hip hop ascended in its popularity and cultural influence, leading to its infamy among certain segments of the population, MCs increasingly saw themselves as persecuted in a messianic fashion, often using the most ignominious language of the church to describe their ordeals. Perhaps most infamously, Chuck D., lead MC of the group Public Enemy, in their 1990 track “Welcome to the Terrordome,” chastises the “so-called chosen” as “frozen” and argues “they [the chosen] got me like Jesus.” The messianic complex of the MC reached its zenith, perhaps, with the figure of 2Pac Shakur, who was shot and killed in 1996. A posthumous album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, featured a crucified 2Pac suggesting that he was a martyr within the culture at large. Despite the shooting initially being ascribed to a west coast gang related retaliation, 2pac’s death, in the subsequent years, has taken on almost mythic proportions, with theories abounding that the FBI might have been involved, as well as theories that, like Jesus, 2pac might still be alive having arisen from death.

Although the deification of 2pac seemingly fits with the longer inter-rap tradition (if not larger aesthetic tradition) of the genius who must be sacrificed for his art, his death transpires so that the art—all the way up to the son, Kendrick Lamar—may live, the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson sees something else in the conflagration of 2pac and Jesus: 

Upon deeper reflection, Tupac’s Black Jesus might have more to do with the 

actual Jesus, the real Jesus, the Jesus of history, than the one whose crucified body bears the marks of his misappropriations and mischaracterizations, and whose resurrected body suffers under the weight of two millennia of historical

accretions and theological distortions. Black Jesus is the Jesus of deep, dark 

history, the God of the underside […] the God who literally got beat down and hung up, the God who died a painful, shameful death, subject to capital 

punishment under political authority and attack, but who came back, and keeps coming back, in the form and flesh we least expect. 

Both 2pac’s thematization of the Black Jesus figure in the posthumous track “Black Jesus” and his ultimate death, weather falsely or not, at the hands of “political authority” is a political act that speaks to a longer tradition of the “black Jesus” within African-American culture. 

In recent years, this figure, the “black Jesus” or, more appropriately, the “black Messiah” has resurfaced as a trope within the culture of rap and R&B. The three albums under consideration, Yeezus, Black Messiah and To Pimp a Butterfly all engage with this figure and with the thematics of redemption in general. West’s album makes this connection explicit with its title (albeit interpolating it into his own nickname), D’Angelo reinvigorates its political efficacy with his album, and Lamar lays out the afterlife (literally by conjuring up 2pac as the estimated prophet at the end of the album) of its tradition.

The Messiah

I don’t come to this topic well-versed in the history of the black Messiah. My interest in the figure comes from the intersection of my research on conceptions of Judaic Messianism in the 20th century thought and my love of hip hop. As these albums were being released, and as the news events of 2014 were unfolding, I was writing a chapter, in an unrelated book project, on the debate between the Jewish theologians Gershom Scholem and Jacob Taubes regarding messianic Judaism. Scholem’s thesis, developed in the essay “Towards an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism” (from which this essay gets its title), argues that while messianism in Judaism “always maintained a concept of redemption as an event which takes place publicly, on the stage of history and within the community,” messianism in Christianity “conceives of redemption as an event in the spiritual and unseen realm […] which need not correspond to anything outside.” Scholem’s critique of the Jewish messianic idea, therefore, leads to “endless powerlessness,” something “preliminary,” concluding that while “there is something grand about living in hope […] at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about it.” In his indictment of the messianic idea, Scholem argues that it “compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished.” Taubes, in his direct response to Scholem’s essay many decades later, argues against its pessimistic conclusions: “It is not the messianic idea that subjugated us to ‘a life lived in deferment.’ Every endeavor to actualize the messianic idea was an attempt to jump into history, however mythically derailed the attempt may have been.” 

Although this inter-Jewish dialogue with regard to the messianic idea would seem to have little to say to the “black Jesus” or the “black Messiah,” Scholem’s initial desire to map out the interiority/exteriority along the Christian/Jewish axis does broaden the scope of the essay’s applicability. The notion of the “black Messiah” complicates the interiority/exteriority distinction Scholem makes. Wilson Jeremiah Moses’ book Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms offers a definition of messianism as follows: “the perception of a person or a group, by itself or by others, as having a manifest destiny or a God-given role to assert the providential goals of history and to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.” Because Moses is interested in both the religious and secular versions of the messianic idea, black messianism affords the flexibility to play with the concept outside of traditional boundaries. Moses argues that “[n]o group of Americans have had more deeply rooted or more stubbornly maintained messianic tradition than black Americans […] This is singular because, unlike the other subgroups in society who have seen themselves as messianic, black Americans have not had a common religion. They have nonetheless been able to maintain a distinct messianic tradition despite differences in class culture and regional background.” In that sense, black Messianism, according to Moses, mirrors more closely 

Scholem’s argument of Jewish messianism, which plays out on the stage of history and within the community. Yet, there is a theological difference insofar as the Jewish messiah still remains a religiously redemptive force that speaks of the fulfillment of laws. And, since a portion of the African-American community still identifies itself as Christian, there is, one would assume, an aspect of the African-American community that would fall under Scholem’s rubric of an interior messianism. 

Moses’ study seems relevant in the analysis of these records not only because of his concentration on black messianism but, because, Moses is interested in mapping out the “literary and historical” dynamics of the myth rather than in the theological efficacy and actuality of the black messiah. This allows for a dynamism which encompasses both “real” historical figures such as Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X but literary figures such as Uncle Tom and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. This mode of analysis is useful for discussing the three albums in question since, the various concepts of messianism and redemption that feature in their music, first and foremost, have a political and secular focus. 

Yeezus

When Kanye West entitled his 2013 record Yeezus it seemed like a cynical joke: the latest in a long line of rappers crowning themselves the second coming. Kanye’s nickname has always been “Yeezy”—a nickname given to him by Jay-Z—and the album title conflates his nick name with Jesus. At the listening party for the album, however, Kanye elaborated on the origin of the title: “Simply put: West was my slave name and Yeezus is my god name.” Whether or not one wants to think that might be the most cynical move of all—using the Nation of Islam’s removal of the slave name to give himself the most exalted new one—Kanye clearly wants to mark the title of his album as a continuation of political history. Of course, this isn’t the first time that Kanye had explicitly gone political. His first exposure on a national stage, beyond the music world who had already embraced him after the release of The College Dropout (2004), was a nationally televised segment in a concert for the victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In his rambling comments,  West compares  the lack of response to the African-American victims of Katrina with the media’s representation of the event, his own culpability in contributing to the culture of consumerism before helping members of his own community (his self-condemnation echoes George W. Bush’s now (in)famous address after 9/11 that Americans should go out and shop), and the war in Iraq.  After his co-presenter, the comedian Mike Meyers, discusses the loss of “the spirit of the people of Southern Louisiana and Mississippi”, Kanye West looks straight into the camera and utters the sentence for which he is still somewhat famous: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Again, it’s entirely possible to understand Kanye’s statement as part of a larger, cynical strategy to become a known commodity through shock (something for which he would become increasingly famous). What’s fascinating, however,  is both the distant echoes and contemporary realities of political undercurrents that run through his public life and work. For someone who is mocked (even by the current president!) as a “jackass,” it seems that his understanding of contemporary politics, refracted through the prism of mass-media culture, is part of his work. 

To this end, it is significant he concludes his 2010 album, My Dark Twisted Fantasy, with an unexpurgated section of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Comment #1,” an overtly political poem critiquing American hegemonic ideology, concluding with the repeated phrase “who will survive in America?” It’s a curious ending to Kanye’s album, an album which, throughout most of it, Kanye seems more interested in discussing his own fame and relationships then discussing politics per se. More fascinating still is that he concludes his album with a voice that is not his, rather, it is Gil Scott-Heron’s, a complex artist in his own right who emerged, originally, as a spoken-word musician (it’s worth noting that in his first solo hit, “Through the Wire,” Kanye compares his own style not with “coke and birds” but with “spoken word”) firmly rooted in the Black Power movement of the late 60s. In the original song, the parts not sampled by Kanye, Gil Scott-Heron dedicates “Comment #1” to the “Rainbow conspiracy” of The Students For A Democratic Society, The Black Panthers and the Young Lords. In Gil Scott-Heron’s original track, the possibility of this coalition is called into question due to the class and racial differences that exist between the various groups. 

You could make the argument that Yeezus is the answer to the question posed on the final track My Dark Twisted Fantasy: living “upside-down”, only a messiah-like figure could save us from the “rapist known as freedom, free-DOOM”. But if it seemed easier to imagine in Heron’s time a messianic figure emerging from any of the “Rainbow Conspiracy,” even if Scott-Heron seems to have no illusions regarding said conspiracy,  then who will redeem America  in 2013? Thus, the ambivalent messiah in Yeezus emerges, willing to portray himself as confused and materialistic, far away from the spiritual but always hinting at the political. What’s important about Kanye’s statement regarding the album title is not his own self-aggrandizement, rather that he would remind everyone that as long as we adhere to the slave name we will remain slaves (even if the “new slaves” no longer quite resemble the old). 

If there is a theme that marks Yeezus’ redemption of the world, it is that the world seems beyond redemption. Or, rather, that redemption as it was imagined by the Gil Scott-Heron’s of the world, a revolution that will not be televised, won’t even be not-televised. It simply will cease to exist. One of the more controversial songs on Yeezus is “Blood On the Leaves,” which samples Nina Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit,” the powerful civil rights song that Billy Holiday originally made famous. People were offended by Kanye’s use of the sample: that a song ostensibly about a previous relationship would use such a politically charged song as a backdrop. Not only that, but that the version of the song Kanye used is sung by Nina Simone, an artist who, like Gil Scott-Heron, was profoundly effected by the black power movement of the late 60s and early 70s. In Yeezus the personal collapses into the political and the suggestion is that redemption, at once playing out on the stage of recognizable political struggle, now moves into the inter-personal and, perhaps most problematically, the economic.

“Blood On the Leaves” isn’t the first reference to “Strange Fruit” on the album, that comes in “New Slaves”. “New Slaves” begins with an image from this earlier period of civil rights struggle, an artifact, a fading photograph, that begins only slightly after “Strange Fruit” leaves off: “My momma was raised in the era when/ Clean water was only served to the fairer skin.” But now West lives in a different time: You see it's broke nigga racism/ That’s that ‘Don't touch anything in the store’/ And it's rich nigga racism/ That’s that ‘Come in, please buy more’ […] Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin’/ Spendin' everything on Alexander Wang/ New Slaves.” Just as West bates his listeners by equating a failed relationship with lynchings in the south, he now equates hyper-capitalism and consumerism with a new slavery for blacks with disposable incomes: hardly the redeemer that will save the meek of the earth. Yet, by the end of the song, he places his own slavish affluence against a more systemic problem: “Meanwhile the DEA/ Teamed up with the CCA/ They tryna lock niggas up/ They tryna make new slaves/ See that’s that privately owned prison/ Get your piece today” If Yeezus/Kanye is trying highlight the real new slaves of racist late capital, then what is his solution for fighting against this system? “They prolly all in the Hamptons/ Braggin’ ‘bout what they made/ Fuck you and your Hampton spouse/ Came on her Hampton blouse/ And in her Hampton mouth.” Hardly a solution for reforming the CCA but it suggests that the new politics of redemption won’t come from a figure of the outside who is “yet without sin”. Based on this problematic lyric, the redeemer may come directly from an old racist stereotype itself: the sexually depraved former slave who will rape “our” white women. Although he received a lot of flack for these lyrics, the assumptive violence which lies underneath West’s evocation of the racist stereotype fails to die: as I write this essay Dylan Rood killed nine people in the A.M.E. Emanuel Church, allegedly telling the congregants as he killed them: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. You have to go.”

Although such uses of a racist tradition hardly seems redemptive, the music offers a redemptive moment. The most striking musical moment on the album, of which there are many, comes at the end of the aforementioned “New Slaves”. Out of the minimal electronic track (disruptive, verging on the avant-garde) comes, at the end, a completely different kind of music, a completely different kind of song: a hard rock sample from the Hungarian rock band Omega plays while West and the singer Frank Ocean proclaim: “I won’t end this high, not this time again/ So long, so long, you cannot survive/ And I’m not dyin’ and I can’t lose/ I can’t lose, no, I can’t lost/ Cause I can’t leave it to you/ So let’s get too high, get too high again […]” “High” here can mean a number of different things: there is the obvious connotation of getting high (with the additional “too high” echoing the first track off of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, where the main character, a girl who is never named, continuously gets “too high” to avoid the world around her) but it can also be understood as a commentary on the music itself: whereas most of the track is content to stay in the low end of things (low end theory) the outro modulates up and “ends high”. West seems to admonish it/himself for ending what is ultimately an aggressive indictment of the slavery/imprisonment pipeline on a “high” note (literally…that guitar solo keeps reaching for the highest register possible). It reminds me of something John Berger recently wrote in Harper’s: “A song fills the present, while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere.” 

We are now listening to this song in 2015 after Ferguson, after #blacklivesmatter and, what might resonate most for this song, #icantbreathe. All of these statements come after Yeezus, although we can’t un-hear their resonance today. “I’m not dying”, “I can’t lose” and “not this time” seems, to us, to be slogans on signs, chants heard during the mass marches that have sprung up over the last year or so. So, despite the darkness, this is ultimately a song of hope. A messianic hope that “you” (here read as the system that produces the new slaves) cannot survive and the “I” (Kanye, Frank Ocean, black men, Kendrick Lamar who will name his single of 2014 “i”) can’t lose, won’t die and, certainly, won’t leave it to you. West doesn’t leave the track with his and Frank Ocean’s vocals (like “Who Will Survive in America” West wants to leave the last word to others), he ends it with a vocal sample from Omega in Hungarian. And I will leave my discussion of Yeezus  with a translation of its final, surprising words: “One day the sun, too tired to shine/ Slept in the deep, green sombre lake/ And in the darkness, the world did fail/ Until she came, for all our sake.”

Black Messiah

If Kanye West reimagines the messiah as Yeezus, the materialist messiah that can only redeem from the stalls of the money lenders, D’Angelo and the Vanguard return to the traditional notion of the messiah—albeit a black messiah. The album was originally supposed to be released in 2015, but after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in Staten Island, D’Anglo decided to release the album before the end of the year, thus commenting on real events as they are unfolding. The redemptive politics that D’Angelo describes on the album, echo the traditional civil rights and post-civil rights struggles that haunt Kanye’s record in the sampled figures of Gil Scott Heron and Nina Simone. Kanye’s Yeezus is a singular messianic figure that replaces the slave name only to point out the slavery of consumerism; D’Angelo’s Black Messiah is the collective struggle towards redemption. The cultural critic Nelson George provides a definition for the album title in the liner notes: “It’s [the album title] about people rising up in Ferguson and in Egypt and in Occupy Wall Street and in every place where a community has had enough and decides to make change happen. It’s not about praising one charismatic leader but celebrating thousands of them […] Black Messiah is not one man. It’s a feeling that collectively, we are all that leader.” This is reflected in the album cover artwork: a photograph of people holding up their hands in fists. There is no context for the photo: it could be a photograph from 1968 or it could be a photograph from 2014. That’s the point. Until the world is redeemed there will always be a need for the (black) Messiah. 

This seems to place D’Angelo’s record back in the realm of 2Pac’s “Black Jesus,” as opposed to West’s “Yeezus”. As Michael Eric Dyson explains in his essay “Searching for Black Jesus”: “When the divine intersects human identity, a transformative energy is unleashed that redeems finitude and furnishes the human project with unshakable purpose [….]” D’Angleo, unlike 2Pac, decides to name his album Black Messiah rather than Black Jesus. The lack of denomination in the title suggests a universalizing of the “transformative energy” that Dyson speaks of, and that Nelson George makes explicit in his liner notes. In contrast to Yeezus, the redemptive power of Black Messiah, is still firmly political in a traditional sense: marching, on the ground, with bodies in the fight. The “blood on the leaves” of this struggle will be as likely to  come from the bodies of present in the streets, as well as the blood of those who are invisible behind institutional walls. 

The two songs on the album that make its politics most explicit are “1000 Deaths” and “The Charade”. Although D’Angelo had been working on this record for almost a decade before it was released, the song titles seem like possible hashtags themselves, slogans passing across your Twitter feed. The first, “1000 Deaths” begins with a sample from a former Nation of Islam spokesman, and New Black Panther party leader Khalid Abdul Muhammad. His presence links contemporary struggles with the struggles of the past, a past that seemed past on Yeezus, where the old (er) struggles were replaced by the “new slavery” of capitalism. On D’Angelo’s record the same wars are being fought time and time again. “Jesus, the black revolutionary Messiah […] the devil talked about a New World Order. The devil talked about giving Jesus all of this world out there, if Jesus would just seek an alliance with him, if he would just bow down to him.” The sample betrays the difference between the two messages: Yeezus fools himself into thinking that he can survive in America by imitating the very actions that had been sold to him, infiltrate, and then show them at their game (or worse). Black Messiah still imagines redemption outside of this system in struggle and solidarity. The second sample is from Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party: ”Black people need some peace, white people need some peace and we are going to have to fight, we’re going to have to struggle we’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace because the people that we’re asking for peace, they’re a bunch of megalomanic war-mongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means.” The sample surprisingly, given its source, speaks of a shared inter-racial need for peace against the true enemy: the military-industrial complex. The two samples form a genealogy of the moment we are in: the marches in Ferguson mirror the marches in the late 80s and early 90s (the period from which Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s speech was given), which mirror the struggles of the late 60s. Adding the “war mongers” to the critique allows another layer of meaning: the endless wars of the last two decades that have drained resources and bodies from the African American community and beyond. 

Musically, the track recalls the force and murk of Sly and the Family Stone’s classic record There’s A Riot Going On. That album pessimistically mapped out the disillusionment felt at the end of the 1960s into the 1970s, as protest movements morphed into an inward-turning narcissism. However, D’Angelo and the Vanguard turn that murk into a battle cry: “I been a witness to this game for ages/ And if I stare death in the face, no time to waste.” Later: “Yahweh, Yehushua/ He don’t want no coward soldier/ Aaah stick in the golden sand/ Musta dina hearda ma prayer/ I receive everything that it means/ And wield it victoriously/ Aha, and cast out all the wickedness/ (When they) send me over the hill/ I was born to kill/ Send me over the hill.” The chorus concludes with a paraphrase from Shakespeare’s Julius Caeser: “Because a coward dies a thousand times/ But a soldier only dies just once.” The connection to Sly Stone’s ambivalence is juxtaposed in the speech from Fred Hampton that begins the track: to achieve peace we must wage war. Yet, ambivalence in terms does not translate to ambivalence in political motives and it is the living (at the end of the day) who must wage war to achieve peace, even if, as D’Angelo’s lyrics make clear: “I [We] been a witness to this game for ages.” 

This sentiment is echoed in the following track “The Charade.” Sly Stone murk has been traded for Prince-like clarity, indeed the song sounds like something that might have fit well on Prince’s mid-80s political masterpiece Sign O’ the Times. The main target of “The Charade” seems to be the media, a “virtual [hive] mind fucks in streams.” Uplifted by political movements that have grown over recent years, the “Twitter” revolutions mentioned by George in his liner notes (Ferguson, Egypt and the Occupy movements), D’Angelo sings: “With a faith at the size of a seed enough to be redeemed/ Relegated to savages bound by the way of the deceivers/ So anchors be sure that you’re sure we ain’t no amateurs.” George and D’Anglo universalize the struggle to reveal “at the end of the day, the charade,” offering the seed of redemption. The song “The Charade,” however, racializes the struggle nonetheless: the “savages” who, it is repeated throughout the song, get “only […] outlined in chalk” are the members of the black community whose motives are constantly questioned (most often far more violently than the motives of white, Occupy protesters) by “the media” and “anchors.” What might connect Black Messiah with Yeezus is the understanding that redemption comes not in spite of the over mediation of the resistance, but is concomitant with the “fuck stream” of the media itself. 

To Pimp A Butterfly

The absent center of both Yeezus and Black Messiah is the first black president Barak Obama. Although the right seems to have a monopoly is defaming the president as a black messiah (at least viewed as one by the dupes who elected him to office), nevertheless there is a way, at least on the political level, the election of the first black president should have  produced some kind of political redemption. That the murder of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, among countless others, could have taken place during the Obama presidency seems both shocking and sadly inevitable. That one expected something  to change with his election is one of the central points of Kendrick Lamar’s dense, difficult To Pimp A Butterfly. 

The White House looms in the background of the album cover artwork. Like D’Angelo, Lamar uses black and white, with the image of the White House scratched and distorted as if it were an older photograph (much like the timelessness of the photograph on the cover of D’Angelo’s record) but this time a mass, another mass, of bodies occupy the foreground: roughly a dozen young African-American men, shirtless, with requisite (per the media’s representation) blunts, and stacks of money. The image plays on the old joke: what if there were a black man in the White House? The joke of the first black president. The joke, told by some of the greatest black comedians of the last several decades, either plays upon the idea that the first black president will barely be able to “pass” as white before giving himself away by, to paraphrase Dave Chapelle, “getting real.” This getting real can either be reflected in language and/or demeanor, leading to the (unspoken) reality that white America would never allow it. Of course, we do have a black president, so this begs the question how does the reality of a black president match up with the culture’s assumptions beforehand? This is Lamar’s cover: although there is a black man sitting in the White House, the black men in front of the White House are the “real” version of the joke. They not only represent the actual black president(s) that we (someday) will have, they also are stand-ins for Barack Obama’s “black male America” which he routinely evokes with which to either sympathize or criticize. 

Tracks two through four on the album, “For Free?” through “Institutionalized”, thematize the idea of “the king”—with Lamar playing the role of the king. The first, a jazz-infused spoken work performance, plays like a 21st century version of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas’ “Tramp” with the female voice admonishing the male for not being “shit”. It ends with her voice telling Lamar “you ain’t no king” which immediately goes into the second of the three tracks “King Kunta”. The title refers to the character of Kunta Kinte from Alex Haley’s novel Roots, with the reference of “cut the legs off him” a reference to the plantation owner cutting of Kinte’s foot so that he won’t run off the plantation. Though Kinte was not a king, Lamar re-imagines him (and himself) as a king: “from a peasant to a prince to a motherfuckin’ king.” As with many rappers before him, Lamar imagines himself as the savior of rap, in contrast to the rappers who are plagiarists (“a rapper with a ghost writer”) or self-destructive (“everybody’s suicidal, they ain’t even need my help”). Fascinatingly, what gives Lamar his power is “the yams”, a reference that winds its way from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man all the way back to the African culture that birthed the character of Kunte Kinte. This trope will lead to the fellow compatriots who also “got the yams”: Richard Prior and Bill Clinton. 

Why these two? Pryor is often considered the greatest African-American comic and, perhaps, the greatest comic period. More specifically, Pryor, in a televised skit from the late 70s, played the first black president. The skit takes place during a white house press briefing, starting out as a typical, boring press briefing that slowly reveals the “black president” for who he is, becoming more belligerent to the white journalists and revealing his affinity with the militant black journalists in the group. The whole skit ends with a white journalist asking the black president about “his mamma” before Pryor runs to go off and fight him. This image of the black President unable to control his “blackness” will be repeated twenty years later in a stand-up routine by Cedric the Entertainer in the film the Kings of Comedy who, in the voice of a spectator who has just witnessed a press conference in which the black president, again, fights a white journalist, states “the president fight too much…that’s why I don’t go nowhere with him!” This is why the idea of the “black president” seemed impossible in a white dominated society: the black man who would be president couldn’t control his true nature as violent black male. 

It’s ironic that Cedric the Entertainer’s routine makes reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal that nearly ended Bill Clinton’s presidency (as in a black president would never stand to have white journalists talk about his public life that openly, in front of his family, friends, etc.) Lamar makes reference to this scandal (“the yam…manipulated Bill Clinton with desires”), however his appearance in “King Kunte” contains another layer. In a now famous piece in the New Yorker, Toni Morrison suggested that: “white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” The label of Bill Clinton being the first “black president” stuck, so much so that even Clinton himself commented on it stating, to Jimmy Kimmel, that he “love[s] being called the first black president.” 

Of course, it’s hard to read Morrison’s piece after Obama’s election. Lamar is aware of this: from the cover of his album to the concerns of the lyrics. “King Kunta”  moves into “Institutionalized” wherein Lamar sing/raps: “If I was the president/ I’d pay my mama’s rent/ Free my homies and then/ Bulletproof my Chevy doors/ Lay in the White House and get high, Lord/ Who ever thought?” This is Richard Pryor and Cedric’s black president: when he finally gets in the White House (still marked by the linguistic wish fulfillment “If I was…”) thinks only of his own community and family, is marked by the violence of the inner city and ends up lazy and high inside the White House. In Lamar’s verses he is a walking stereotype, but ends up in reality (“who ever thought?”) The title of the track has a double edged meaning: Institutionalized refers to the incarceration of young African-American males (“I’m trapped inside the ghetto and I ain’t proud to admit it”; “Institutionalized, I could still kill me a nigger” and “Free my homies”) but it also refers to the ascendency of the “real” black president to the institution of power. It’s worth remembering that Obama’s main slogan in the 2008 presidential campaign was “Change” and “Change We Can Believe In”. In an ironic, mocking deflation of Obama’s political rhetoric, Lamar changes his voice for the chorus to an older, grandmother figure who admonishes: “Shit don’t change until you get up and wash your ass nigger.” As this chorus suggests, the song, coming after the previous two, is the nagging doubts that remain after one is installed as “king” (even if he is elected president). That young African-American men still are “institutionalized” at a much higher rate than ever before, suggests that the change the Obama presidency promised (specifically to the African-American community) has not yet arrived. 

Lamar ends the album with an imagined conversation between himself and another messianic figure in contemporary culture, the aforementioned 2pac Shakur. Shakur on the album plays the counterpoint to the unspoken figure of the black president. Whereas the president, represented by the White House on the cover and hinted at in the lyrics to “Institutionalized”, is the figure of unfulfilled potential, the continued institutionalization of the African American populace despite the black president’s arrival and institutional power, it is 2pac who is allowed to speak. At the end of “Mortal Man” Kendrick asks 2pac (whose responses are taken from a twenty year old interview conducted for a Swedish radio show) what he thinks the future holds for Lamar’s generation. 2pac responds: “[n]ext time it’s a riot there’s gonna be, like, uh, bloodshed for real.” And, making the apocalyptic prophecy even more explicit, Tupac goes on to say: “It’s gonna be murder, you know what I’m saying, it’s gonna be like Nat Turner, 1831, up in this muthafucka.” The bifurcation of the messianic idea continues anew with the black president essentially telling the African community: I have arrived, I live in the White House but you, like the throng of African American men on Lamar’s album cover, will continue to wait outside. The evocation of Turner makes the tension of institutional politics and redemptive violence explicit. 2pac, like the apocalyptic messianists that have always, in the words of Jacob Taubes, attempted to “jump into history”, imagines the arrival through apocalypse. 

Yet, 2Pac doesn’t have the final word on the album. Instead Lamar reads a spoken word piece, attributed to a friend of his, which describes, in his own words, “his world”.  In this piece, the caterpillar is set against the butterfly: the caterpillar is “prisoner to the streets that conceived it” whereas the butterfly “represents the talent, the thoughtfulness, and the beauty” within the caterpillar. Although the metaphor traverses much with regard to the themes of the album, it can also be grafted onto the ongoing messianic discourse found within these three albums: if the butterfly is the final arrival of what the caterpillar “ought” to be, then the caterpillar represents the  “faulty” consciousness of what gets left behind. The butterfly might best be represented by Kanye West’s Yeezus—the messianic insect, which emerges fully formed within the culture “pimping” to his own benefit (reality shows, sneaker brands, indulging in the logical of consumptive capitalism as a way to liberate oneself) and the caterpillar is represented by D’Angelo’s Black Messiah—fighting the struggle both outside and inside, adhering to an older form of resentment that marks him as the soldier fighting the “good fight."

 Lamar, younger than both West and D’Angelo, concludes with a reconciliation, much like the attempted reconciliation between the black president and the revolutionary: “Finally free, the butterfly sheds light on situations that the caterpillar never considered, ending the internal struggle/ Although the butterfly and caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.” This is not much different from the ending of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing where the photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X shaking hands we’ve seen throughout the film is shown with two quotations from the men: the former predictably admonishing violence as a method of achieving racial justice and the later arguing that violence as a means of self-defense is justified. Yet, Lee’s film was made at a time when the thought of a black president would have been the material for comedians. Now that the black president has arrived—a political form of messianism in which racial reconciliation is imagined because whites too have voted for a black president—seemingly there is no need for redemption. The long arc of justice (let’s not forget that in Judaism the messiah was often imagined carrying a sword) has been reached. But what about 2Pac? Lamar asks for his response to the caterpillar/butterfly analogy, but gets no response. If the messiah will come when he is no longer needed, as Kafka’s quotation which serves as an epigraph for the essay says, then 2Pac’s silence proves we’re still living in the hope of his arrival.

The “In” Sound from Way “Out”

According to the Nielson company, vinyl sales hit an all-time low in 1993. Less than half a million vinyl units were sold in that year and few then current releases were even pressed onto vinyl. Although independent record labels continued to release vinyl records, vinyl as a medium seemed to be experiencing its obsolescence. And yet, that medium, in all its seeming obsolescence, is staring back at us from the cover of Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements: a close-up of a tone arm, cartridge and needle playing along a record, sitting on a turn table.

This is long before the recent resurgence of vinyl. So, the question is: what did this album cover mean in 1993? It’s original reception seems completely inscrutable now. And, yet, I was there. I bought the album on cd in 1993 and must have experienced the cover as no more than an homage to a (then) soon dead artifact. I remember listening to the cd that year and wondering, in the middle of “Golden Ball” with its reproduced vinyl slips and skips, what those slips and skips would sound like on record—whether or not one could reproduce those sounds on record—as if hip hop hadn’t already taught all of us that the sound of vinyl as vinyl could be reproduced on vinyl. 

If this album cover had been released at any point in the last ten to fifteen years it might be understood as a form of vinyl fetishism. But did the average listener to Transient Random-Noise Bursts in 1993 know that he/she was supposed to fetishize vinyl? Some obviously did. The band did. In 1993 Stereolab released a limited-edition vinyl copy of the record pressed on sparkling gold vinyl. The vinyl was warped and most copies were returned but the acknowledgement of the vinyl as special object—after all, a fetish, before all sexual connotations, is an object imbued with certain magical properties—already existed in the life and history of the record. 

But the fetishism extends beyond the object itself, it extends beyond the appearance of the record, turntable, tone-arm and stylus on the cover, since the cover is a reference to another record. The cover, and some of the samples inside, are from a 1969 test record pressed by a Hi-Fi magazine in the UK. The back cover also mimics the test record’s layout with one side of the upper half announcing “About This Record” while the other side promises “Technical Data”—the former listing the lyrics and the later providing the band members, producers, etc. There are two headers above that information done in hi-fi record rhetoric (i.e. “hi-fi is the convenient tag we use when we mean the art and science of hi-fidelity!”) and an announcement for the label itself: “for people who desire the finest in sound…always demand: Duophonic Ultra High Frequency Disks!”

The ironic tone, the gentile mocking of a pseudo-scientific discourse surrounding high fidelity, is a reference to a bygone era when, in the post-war boom, people had enough disposable income to spend on high end stereos with test records meant to do things like “confirm secure tracking” and “test the acceptability of equipment noise.” (both of these examples come from Transient Random-Noise Bursts). Think for a moment about a culture that purchased records without music, rather with “sounds” meant to balance and stabilize audio equipment. The obsession with this type of record—and the era of which it is a symptom—reached some kind of apotheosis in the mid-90s with actual cd reissues of what was labeled as “bachelor pad music” (as artifacts, not as test records themselves) and bands either purposely titling their records after actual records of the time (a la Stereolab) like Nation of Ulysses’ Raymond Scott-referencing “Soothing Sounds for Baby” all the way up to and including REM’s “New Adventures in Hi-Fi.” (when I saw REM during the Monster tour in 1995, Michael Stipe introduced “Losing My Religion”—by far their biggest hit—as “an obscure song off of Equivel’s soundtrack to Journey Into Fear” Juan Esquivel being one of the leading auteurs of this type of stereo test record/bachelor pad music hybrid). But in 1993 this fetish didn’t have a name yet…in many respects Stereolab—whose name already references a stereo test record—was creating this fetish. The point of this book is to ask why they did it. 

“Retrieve the past, Like a prayer, Bringing it back, Into the light, What was yesterday, Will reform today, To retrieve, Lost life, Lost loves, Retrieve, Lost words, Ideas, Overcome, Unconscious, Made conscious, Out of the darkness, Into consciousness, Made conscious, Out of the darkness, Into…”-“Pause”

Transient Random Noise-Bursts With Announcements is an album haunted by the past, yet, as the lyrics of “Pause” suggest, it is haunted by a past that “will reform today.” As the vinyl object faced its own obsolescence, as most of the instruments used by the group on the record (“vox organ”, “moog”, “farfisa”) were being replaced by midi patches and computer programs that could replicate those sounds (and improve upon them), and as the musical styles echoed in the bachelor pad, bossa nova, le yipe yipe sound had been subsumed by a history that privileged first the “authentic” voice of rock and then the “authentic” reaction to rock in punk (whose basic structure and ideology could be traced up through early 90s grunge), Stereolab set out to create an eulogy for an increasingly obsolete world. 

Yet, the irony of this very story, the story told by this record, is that this pre-fetishization would go on to, in a sense, become a type of marker of taste and knowledge that would come to dominate the last 20 years of music—from the aforementioned renewed interest in hi-fi records, to the sampling of easy listening, French pop, electronic music in independent rock, hip-hop, etc., Stereolab’s record casts a long shadow.

Yet, the influence of Transient Random Noise-Bursts goes beyond music. It’s constant references to other things (artwork, music, styles, etc.) creates a kind of archive wherein one can discover these past relics. It’s no coincidence that one of the very first websites I ever visited was a Stereolab fan site back in 1994. Here, fans would gather together to figure out all of the musical references in the songs as well as the visual and titular references as well. 

The obsessive collecting mindset that clearly is already apparent in the artwork and music of the record would come to be the dominant form of listening and music consumption in the decades after—what Simon Reynold’s in his book Retromania would call, somewhat dismissively, “record collection rock”. Indeed, there are moments in the last two decades of music, including Stereolab’s own catalogue, where the influence of the past has turned into a pastiche of sounds and styles in the present. 

However, that hadn’t yet been codified when Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements came out: there wasn’t a place where styles from different ages could be archived, researched and then tried on. Instead, on Transient Random-Noise Bursts, Stereolab attempt to “reform today” by recovering the obsolete moments of the past before they are forgotten. In this way, Stereolab’s record may, in its original intention, actually be a rejoinder to Reynold’s highly influential thesis in Retromania that we are a culture obsessed with our own nostalgia for the past.

“Look at our symbols/they are alive/they move, evolve/and then they die.” -“Wow and Flutter”

Stereolab’s first releases, singles, eps and one album, “Peng”, all featured variations on the same cover: a cartoon illustration of “Cliff”, a comic of a figure in authority who eventually bumps you off, the good bourgeois spectator. Although the comic is Swiss, it echoes many of the same concerns of the French Situationists, whose writings, graffiti and films were highly influential upon the uprising in Paris during May of 1968.  In their original inception, the Situationists saw themselves as an antidote to the modern spectacle of post-war capitalist society. One of their projects, articulated in a 1963 text by intellectual “leader” Guy Debord, was to bring the art of the past “into play in life and to reestablish priorities,” or, as a Situationist text from 1967 underscores, “past creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified and brought back to life.” 

This is the project of Transient Random-Noise Bursts: to free the forms of past creativity and bring them back to life. Yet two questions remain for Stereolab’s project: 1) it remains imperative, if we aren’t to simply agree with Reynolds that Stereolab are symptomatic of a “nostalgia industry”, that we historicize Stereolab’s project. That is to say, Stereolab’s record is symptomatic not of the malaise that Reynolds attempts to diagnose but right before that moment…the “end of history” as it has been described in short-hand. To this end, a much better analytical work for reading the album might be Joshua Clover’s book 1989, which attempts to read the events of 1989, “watching the world wake up from history”, through the pop music of the time. 1993 is not that far away from 1989, and, if we consider that Stereolab’s earliest recordings date from 1990, then the loss and transformation that takes place in and around 1989 informs Stereolab’s aesthetic project. 

The second question then has to do with object choice: if this rupture offers the opportunity to re-evaluate history anew, then why do Stereolab select the more arcane and banal artifacts to reanimate this engagement with the past? Here we return to the initial discussion of vinyl obsolescence. In his 1925 essay “Dream Kitsch” the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin argues: “technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell […] It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast […] and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects a their most threadbare and timeworn point.” Though Benjamin was describing another history-defining turn, from the late 19th to early 20th centuries, his injunction: “When we reach for the banal, we take hold of the good along with it—the good that is there (open your eyes) right before you” could be Stereolab’s aesthetic program. 

This doesn’t just simply “flip the script” and create a new canon, it creates an eruption in the flow of time and understanding—much like the moments on the record when, in the middle of “I’m Going Out of My Way” or “Pause” or “Jenny Ondioline” a voice, a recording, a numbers’ station from the past emerges and disrupts and takes hold. 

“That what is exciting/The challenge, it’s the new nation/But the tensions have to be created, there’s no doubt.” -“Jenny Ondioline” 

However, what Reynold’s book teaches us is that there is a risk in this process: indeed, Stereolab did (either wittingly or unwittingly) create an “alternative” canon: one of the things that decorated my dorm room wall was an interview with the band in chickfactor magazine wherein they offered a list of “records they cannot live without”, which included then impossible-to-find records by Silver Apples, Neu, Faust and Electric Eels. And, as Stereolab grew in recognition (they never were popular), the tracks that more explicitly referenced earlier bands (“Jenny Ondioline” and Neu, “Metronomic Underground” and Can) were offered up as evidence that the band was artistically bankrupt, and a growing suspicion (which would extend to many of their cohorts—thus seemingly legitimizing Reynold’s “record collecting rock” tag) that music was beginning to cannibalize itself rather than innovate. 

However, this record comes before all this. It’s a moment before the creation of new canons and the ossification of cultural artifacts. It’s a pause in the sonic shape of a lock-groove lullaby of dream kitsch. 

Pirate Nina

“This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.” -Nina Simone, “Mississippi Goddamn” 

A great aside from a great song, but maybe the show had been written already? I ask this question because the same album that has Simone’s definitive reading of THAT song, the song that both broke her carrier, and, possibly, broke her as a person (the person that could no longer be a simple “entertainer’ but couldn’t find a place in a racist society that wanted her to simply be an “entertainer”) comes a couple of songs after a show tune that HAD been written for a show, even if that show was, in reality, a piece of agitprop political theater written in Weimar Germany in the late 1920s. “Pirate Jenny” comes from the Threepenny Opera, and Simone’s version of it is THE version of the song. It is the version I show my intro to German Studies class every time I teach Brecht’s play. I show it to them not because it gives them insight into the culture of Brecht’s time, but because it, more than Lotte Lenya’s original version of the song, proves Brecht right: epic theater isn’t meant to embalm a time or place for the reader or viewer, nor is it simply meant to lull the spectator into a somnambulism of entertainment,  but is meant to mobilize the viewer into something that looks like political reflection and action. 

My students have no experience of the working class in Germany during the 1920s. To them it might as well be as relevant as the plebs of the Roman empire, the slaves of Egypt or the beggars of John Gay’s opera. But Nina Simone, though few of my students are aware of her and her music (that just might be rectified by the recent Netflix documentary “What Happened, Miss Simone?”), performs something in that song that we as Americans live in the way we live with air and water: the long history of racism and slavery. Simone transports the titular character of the song from an imagined German port town to South Carolina, where the figure of a pirate queen among the citizens seems more implausible than a pirate queen among the German sea merchants. The original Pirate Jenny seemed a fanciful character—and Brecht, ever the dialectician, can’t decide whether Pirate Jenny’s revenge is either liberation or the worst form of false consciousness. Someday I’ll show them who’s boss! I’ll have my revenge on these men who take me for granted! This is what the exploited worker says every day of her life. Equally applicable to Marx as to Trump. The song, in the original play, is a story that Polly, the love interest of Macheath and daughter to the beggar king Peachum, relates to Mac’s band of criminals on her wedding night. The whole wedding night is played as farce: a bourgeois wedding in the middle of a horse stable. Polly insists on having her chaiselongue like any respectable woman of society, even as her husband is being hunted for pimping and murder. 

Outside of the play’s context, Simone’s performance is simply related as the story of Pirate Jenny. Many years after the original recording, Simone will introduce the song thus: “this is the story of Jenny in a flop house in Germany. We have transported Jenny to a flop house in South Carolina. And Jenny has decided to kill everybody this night. Everybody who has come to that flop house and then she is going home.” The context couldn’t be more different: in Brecht’s original Jenny’s story is related through the character of Polly as a kind of pantomime: the audience never believes that Jenny is really a pirate queen intent on getting her revenge on the men who have exploited her labor at the flop house. Simone doesn’t care about the context. Hell, she doesn’t really give a fuck whether or not Jenny IS a pirate queen. The most important point is that Jenny will kill everyone this night. Pirate queen or not. And it is in this re-interpretation of the song that reveals something Brecht was afraid to make manifest through his multiple layers of storytelling and distancing: the distance between a flop house in Germany and South Carolina is the difference (or is it the final, dialectical conflagration) of race and class. By the time Simone sings the song at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 1992 the bitterness of years spent in exile suffering from fatigue has warn the voice and the message: Simone perhaps has already come to embody the Jenny figure: the last pirate queen standing, threatening the white patrons of the flop house with a death sentence that will never come. 

But, goddamn indeed, what can the listener make of the younger Simone singing this song in 1964 after the marches and church bombings? She’s about to introduce “Mississippi Goddamn” a few songs later. As so many have pointed out, only a woman could get away with such radically political songs sung openly in public. And so, when Simone whispers in Pirate Jenny “kill them now, or later?” its not the wishful thinking of some barmaid in Germany but the first insurrection of an artist who, a mere few years later, will ask an audience in Harlem “are you ready to kill if necessary? Is your mind ready? Is your body ready? […] are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings if necessary?”

What happens to artists who dare to ask such violent questions in public? It’s no coincidence that both Brecht and Simone ended up in exile, although Brecht would be given the option of Hollywood and, eventually, be given his own theater in East Germany—where the speaking  of such violent truths became the founding myth of the state itself. Of course, by the time those truths had been codified into state sanctioned myths, they obfuscated other violent acts that couldn’t be spoken. And to the material conditions that enabled THOSE myths, Brecht remained silent. This isn’t to condemn Brecht, no one knows what sort of comforts would have awaited even Pirate Jenny had she been allowed to return home. But Simone never enjoyed Brecht’s status as a state sanctioned artist: she played jazz festivals to well ensconced audiences who were either too reverential or bored to care for such ugly truths. But, regardless of where Simone allowed Pirate Jenny to tell her tale of revenge and (mass) murder, when she translates Jenny’s rather sarcastic “whoops” at the end with the southern black woman’s “that’ll learn ya!”, anyone listening can rest assured that they’ve been properly schooled. 

Brian Eno: The Ship

1.

There’s a moment in Brian Eno’s hour and a half interview at the Red Bull music academy in New York where the presenter is about to cue up some of Eno’s music for a BBC program. He accidentally cues up the wrong piece of music and attempts to cue up the correct one. “Oh who cares,” Eno jokingly exclaims, “they all sound the bloody same.” The audience and interviewer chuckle. If any other musician would say something so blatant, admitting that perhaps not each piece of music is its own singular work, it might be tantamount to admitting something that Eno’s critics have been arguing for a long time: it’s all basically the same. However, as fans of Eno have known since he started making ambient music in the mid-70s, these pieces of music are designed to be interchangeable, designed to be ignored. Here’s part of the original liner notes to Discreet Music (1975):

"In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn't the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music - as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience.

Since the music was at an almost inaudible level, it becomes part of the environment: as natural as the rain, as natural as the light."

Eno finally came up with a name for this music, ambient music, and named a series of records after this new musical form. In the liner notes to his first ambient record, Music for Airports, Eno situated this music within the context of the ubiquitous pre-programmed music that was beginning to pervade everyone’s lives in the late 70s. His liner notes are worth quoting in full: 

"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.

Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.

An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.

Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing 

environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by strip ping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the 

environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is 

intended to induce calm and a space to think.

Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without 

enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting."

There are several differences between the conception and execution (as well as explanation) for Discreet Music and Music for Airports. Whereas the former was created through chance and accident (both literally and figuratively), thus recalling Eno’s earliest recordings with Cornelius Cardrew on “The Great Learning,” the later has a specific programmatic purpose. Moreover, Discreet Music, despite Eno’s insistence that it become part of the environment, is still private listening: a man, in bed, unable to fix the stereo. Music for Airports (as suggested even by the title) is a public listening experience, albeit one that does not direct the listener into any prescribed state. A space to think, as Eno calls it.

However, it’s important to read the second essay a bit more closely for what is elided, or what often gets elided, in discussions of Eno’s ambient music. From the start, Eno places his music in direct competition with the company, Muzak Inc. which, as Eno points out, had been providing instrumental background music for spaces since the 1950s. Eno recognizes in Muzak, Inc. a kind of social control (“regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies,”  “supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms”) and sets his ambient music not only as a antidote to background music that functions as covert social control (echoing similar arguments made by Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer against “light jazz” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment) but suggests that his music might be used in direct commercial competition. Read a certain way, the liner notes to Music for Airports might be construed as Eno’s pitch to brand his own form of background music.

What is also elided in Eno’s liner notes is the title itself: why Music for Airports. One can 

surmise that the album itself is a site specific album. In a story that is now well known, the original impetus for the album specifically was a long layover in the Cologne-Bonn airport Eno had in the late 70s, and his reaction to the depressing music he heard playing over the loudspeakers. In an interview just published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung this past weekend Eno added this to his reaction: “I was sitting in the airport and thought, my God, you’ve just spent $500 million dollars on this airport and you play this depressing music?!” The addition of a monetary figure to this already well known story suggests that Eno, in hindsight, already knew that his ambient music might make a better fit for multi-million dollar airports than the “canned” music offered by companies like Muzak. Though it took a while, someone at the Cologne airport eventually agreed: 

"In 2003, inspired by Eno's effort, the Cologne based band plus49 (the country code for Germany) teamed up with a design firm to create music specifically for the Cologne-Bonn Airport. They wrote on-hold music for the telephones, special elevator music and an airport "gong," a four-second piece of music called Happy Sky played before every overhead 

announcement in the airport. The band's song Symbols & Gateways, written to honor the launch of the Germanwings-Airbus 'Spirit of Cologne,' is now the airport theme song and included on an album of airport-inspired music."

Eno’s ambient music had been instrumentalized (and nationalized!) for use in the airport. Music for airports means more airports for music. Rather than the music being a kind of one off performance for a specific airport at a specific time (which has happened several times since the album was originally released in 1978), it can be branded and sold as pre-packaged ambient music to suit the multi-purpose needs of each city’s airport.

The rest, as they say, is history: the demand for Muzak declined over the next two decades, with the company finally filing for bankruptcy in 2010. Although it still exists in some form today through various holding companies, the remnants of the company now have to compete with various other platforms in creating background music. In the 90s and 00s, Muzak had pretty much ditched its self-created instrumental music, using pop songs instead. In a world where now several free and subscription music services can be accessed via one’s phone, there is no need for a subscription service dedicated to streaming music for business and public spaces. Recently, Spotify has begun offering playlists targeted for moods, activities, times of day, etc. suggesting that the need once filled by Muzak is hardly a thing of the past. Quite the opposite: as public spaces have become increasingly obsolete under neoliberalism, the need for mood enhancing, task enabling music has multiplied. Now virtually the only place you don’t hear music out in public IS in outside public spaces, unless you happen to be poor, urban and part of a minority, as predominantly white business owners attempt to chase you away by pumping music they assume you hate: classical music, country music, etc.

If things got tough for Muzak, Inc. since the release of Music for Airports, things only got better for Eno’s new ambient music. Not only had he created an entire genre of music, but he was prescient in realizing that ambient music could become lucrative. Eno has been commissioned to create music from video games, site specific installations, soundtracks and phone apps. Perhaps his most iconic sound is the 3 1/2 second start up music originally used in Windows 95. He has never mentioned how he was paid to create the sound, but one can only imagine it has funded many of his less commercially successful ventures. More than this, the idea of ambient music as a more personalized form of background music has certainly taken hold as older forms of “elevator music” have vanished. Eno understood that the type of cloying harmonies and syrupy strings would create resistance in the listener. Non-identifiable sounds which, as Eno suggests creates “calm and a space to think”, rather than directly confronting the mundane tasks of life under capital, seems to have been taken up by that very same system to create a highly subjectivized psychological space that, in itself, seems to in its own way erase “all sense of doubt and uncertainty.”

Before I continue I would like to offer a disclaimer: I love Brian Eno. I love Brian Eno’s ambient music. I have loved Brian Eno’s ambient music ever since I read Thom Holmes Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music and Culture in high school and became obsessed with the reproduction of the back cover of Discreet Music in there. Until that point I had only thought of music as some kind of passionate expression of the soul screaming to get out. The idea that someone would sit down and draw a diagram of how the music was constructed, music that generated itself no less, seemed to go against everything I thought about music. When I finally found a copy of the record at Tower Records I played it over and over again to my mostly dismissive friends. They all thought it was boring as shit. I’ve listened to Eno’s ambient records on and not on drugs. I’ve listened to those records when I was happy, sad, needed comfort and also needed to challenge myself to sit still and do nothing for 30, 40 (and if I’m listening to Neroli) more than an hour at a time. My first child was born listening to Eno’s ambient records. My second child, born with a congenital heart defect, listened to a cd of Eno’s ambient tracks in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Eno acknowledged this phenomenon in the Red Bull Music Academy interview: “I’ve been told that my music has birthed a whole generation of babies,” he joked. I have no doubt. And so I write this essay not as a take down of Eno, but to critically engage with the category that he came up with. A practice of listening that, while not inventing, has probably done more than anyone else to make a worldwide phenomenon. 

It was my own experience with childbirth, and Eno’s offhand remark, that partially inspired this essay. What does it mean to have one man’s music soundtrack what is, for many, one of the most intimate events in a person’s life? It’s one thing to create challenging background music for airports and art pavilions, it’s another thing for so many people to allow ambient music to part of the experience of creating life itself.  I mean, it’s not like you’re going to soundtrack your childbirth with Muzak. Let’s hold that thought for a minute. The other inspiration for this essay was a particularly nasty review the Wire ran of Eno’s album Small Craft on a Milk Sea (2010). Written by Ian Penniman, the review, which sees the below par quality of the music as a much longer descent for Ian, asks a provocative question: how could Eno, who has become one of the most outspoken political voices in England, produce music that is so facile and unoffensive? The predictability of the music seems to be at odds with the unpredictability of the public persona. Indeed, since the end of the 00s, Eno, who had previously been somewhat mute when it came to political matters (although he did name the B-Side to “King’s Lead Hat” after the Red Army Faction), had become an outspoken advocate for refugees, opponent of Israel and penned a passionate essay in support for labour party chief Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.  At the end of 2015 Eno appeared in a public forum on basic income and participated in a long filmed discussion with anthropologist David Graeber. It seemed that Eno was happy to allow his ambient music to do what it was always intended to do, create a space of calm, while using his relative fame to voice a plea for engaged leftist politics. 

2.

This is where The Ship comes in. It represents a real departure in Eno’s music. It is almost as if he read Penniman’s review and offered his own response. The Ship is unlike any of Eno’s other albums in that it marries the long form style of his ambient pieces with the vocals of his earlier albums. Missing in this essay is any mention of the pop oriented albums Eno has released throughout his career. He has an amazing singing voice and for many, including myself, there has always been a disappointment that he doesn’t release more of them. Eno, however, has said in many interviews that the lyrics he writes in his pop songs are mere word play, a kind of joy in making up nonsense lyrics that fit well with the music rather than meaning anything per se. One of his favorite artists in Kurt Schwitters, the Kurt sampled on “Kurt’s Rejoinder” from Before and After Science, who used a cut-up technique to write lyrics—again, betraying his earliest involvement with Cardrew and the avant garde art world. 

However, despite the fact that Eno has said he used a similar cut-up technique on the album, the lyrics on The Ship are different. He has mentioned in interviews that the Ship was inspired by the sinking of the Titanic and the concurrent first world war. What connects both events, for him, is the human hubris involved in both events. This isn’t the first piece of music that Eno has been involved with that addresses the Titanic’s sinking. The record label Eno started in the mid-70s, Obscure, released Gavin Bryers’ Sinking of the Titanic, a beautiful piece of music which uses recordings of survivors of the sinking against a mix of “Nearer My God, to Thee” and “Amazing Grace,” two songs reportedly played by the ship’s musicians as the ship went down. As the piece develops, it is as if the music and voices themselves are sinking deeper into the mix (the album was produced by Eno). It seems by the end as if everything has been subsumed by water, vanishing into history itself. The Ship, by contrast, seems to begin in the water itself: the mix keeping the listener barely above the water for most of its duration, only to be brought somewhere else (land, the afterlife) by the final piece “Fickle Sun iii (I’m Set Free).” The singing on the first piece, “The Ship,” is sung very low, almost as if Eno were mimicking the tradition of voice singing he has praised elsewhere, combing with the gongs and low electronic tones to become, at times, almost indistinguishable from the music itself. 

The difference between Bryers’ piece and The Ship isn’t just in the mix. Time and context have also altered the meaning of the shipwreck: whereas Bryers seems to take the perspective of the historian, hazily recording the remembrance of an event that was then, 1975, almost lost to history itself. The use of the eyewitness accounts makes this explicit. It isn’t just the aquatic mix that buries the voices, it’s time that is literally erasing the voices of the participants and the music. The Ship, by contrast, makes the event something present, incapable of being erased by time or the inevitable sinking. The song “the Ship” begins: “The Ship was from the willing land/The waves about it roll

And as aglow by powder band/We lift, we loot, we haul” The past tense of the first line is contrasted with the present tense of the second: this isn’t something taking place in the past but in the present. The “willing land” of departure is contrasted with the passengers themselves who are described as “undefined” and then “unrefined.” Whereas the “willing land” sets the ship to see, the inhabitants of the ship seems at odds from the land itself. The interim lyrics expand the picture of the ship’s inhabitants, at least the man who is singing the song: “Oh hallelujah, pray for me,/ the man who turned away./ My desert in a grain of sand./ My life within a day.” Who is this man who turned away? We know historically that there was a tremendous effort to save the victims of the Titanic, but not so this man who sees his life pass by “within a day.” Perhaps it is the next line that offers a clue: “My desert in a grain of sand.” The dryness of the desert is in contrast to the wetness of the sea, but it also suggests that the passenger aboard the ship is from the desert, on board a ship where he is “undefined” and “unrefined.”

As I write this essay, the new is reporting that 1,000 people have drowned in the past week making the dangerous trek from Syria (among other countries) and the EU via the Mediterranean sea. Though he has not explicitly said so, given his comments on Palestinian refugees, and refugees and war orphans in the last twenty years, it’s hard not to imagine that this is on Eno’s mind during “the Ship”.  A female voice soon joins the male in the song: “Can I take the freedom and forget you?/ How can it, form contractions/ Don’t talk that I'm frightened/Do I know exactly my husband?/That I Love You. We miss you, after that/Go get brethren (grab her then)/I still act.” The question in first line offers an impossible choice: for most refugees crossing the sea, it is presented as a choice between reaching “freedom” in the EU or leaving friends and family behind. Of course, the sad reality is that often this is no choice: the freedom promised to refugees by European leaders often results in extended detention and eventual deportation (in the best case) and death (in the worst case). The loss is made palpable by the final lines “That I love you. We miss you, after that” only brightened by the hope of being able to eventual save the ones left behind “Go get brethren (grab her then)/ I still act.” But at this point it is too late: the words become non-sensical, chopped up, images as the water rolls over the passengers until finally a whispering male voice (heavily processed by electronics) overwhelms everything else simply intoning: “As Wave/ After Wave/After Wave….” as the sounds die away and, we assume, the ship finally sinks. 

But the story is not over. The next piece of music, a long, multi-part work entitled “Fickle Sun,” seems to begin where “the Ship” left off. Ominous fragments of sound and the still ever present gong tones greet us, as if the man/woman/people have emerged from the water destitute but alive: “And all the day the work is done/ We toil away in fickle sun/ And all the day the wire is spun/ and so the dismal work is done.” Have they survived? Are they now working in the willing land on the other side of the sea? Eno has said that “Fickle Sun” is specifically about World War I but, unlike say Radiohead’s very moving song “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)”—a tribute to the last living British soldier who died in World War I in 2009—Eno’s World War I piece doesn’t make it’s setting, politics or message as explicit. Eno’s first lines could describe soldiers on a beach, or migrant workers manufacturing goods for the global economy.  The music becomes more ominous, overwhelming, an electric guitar seems to come out of nowhere: “and now the boats are all astray/ as no one rowing anyway/ there’s no one rowing anymore/ abandoned far from any shore.” Eno has returned to the ship metaphor of the previous piece, but now we are clearly on land, albeit not before we are told that the rowing has stopped thus leading the boats astray. The boats aren’t firmly moored to their docks, we imagine them floating, adrift, beyond the horizon of the coast. Perhaps we can’t even see them anymore because the sun itself has become fickle. 

Eno has used this metaphor of boats adrift before: most notably in the songs “Backwater” and “Empty Frame.” However, in both of those songs the notion of a ship adrift leads to comedy rather than tragedy. In “Backwater” a group of people who seem to be in some position of power: a senator from Ecuador, two porter’s daughters, the narrator himself all of whom are drifting in “the deadly waters” (“there were six of us but now we are five”). So death pervades their trip as well, although the turmoil seems to be a way to mock the obliviousness of the passengers who pass the time talking about meteors, conquistadors, emperors, Turkish gurus, logicians, mystics ultimately resigning themselves to being nothing more than “trapped on a leaf in the vine.” It’s no less pessimistic about the fate of the world than The Ship, but the pessimism is more of an emoji shrug than a sea soaked elegy. Something similar happens in “Empty Frame,” although there is a kind of joy contained in the final resolution of that song: “At the edge of the sea/Were the signs of the dove/But the wrong way out/ And the wrong way up. / We pushed the empty frame of reason out the cabinet door, /No we won't be needing reason anymore.” The resignation at the end of “Backwater” has turned into the wisdom that, when you’re adrift as sea with a captain who knows they are “going round in circles,” the best solution might be to push reason out the cabin door and enjoy the drift (indeed, Eno entitled one of his other instrumental albums the Drift). 

On the Ship, though, the people on shore are abandoned by the drifting ship, left to toil in the fickle sun on land. After these lines an orchestra sweeps in, breaking the song in two, letting in the light, the horrible light, from the fickle sun only to be overtaken by the sharpest electronic overtones of Eno’s career. If we can possibly label this music ambient, which it seems to me we cannot—though it, like many of Eno’s ambient pieces, was originally conceived as a site specific piece—then the ambience it creates is fear and despair rather than calm. Finally the tumult subsides and Eno’s voice, accompanied by an organ, intones “All the boys are falling down/ gone to soldier every one.” This makes the World War I reference explicit, although we are also reminded that many of those refugees who attempt to cross the Mediterranean are escaping their fates of being soldiers in the unceasing Syrian civil war. At this point a second, electronically processed voice changes “fickle sun” into “wicked sun” and “checkered sun”. Nature itself is changing, and it would be remiss to point out that underneath all of this man made catastrophe lurks the much larger ecological catastrophe. Finally the phrase “when I was a soldier” recedes into the background and a serious of grotesque, barely recognizable electronically processed voices overwhelm the track. Are these the voices of the dead themselves coming back as revenants? What the listener also notices is a type of chattering going on in the background: what seems like a female voice on the left channel and a male voice on the right. These voices are clipped, glitched, barely recognizable as human speech. They recall the voices which conclude Kraftwerk’s “Computer World 2” at the end of the first side of Computer World. Many have remarked how prescient that album is in predicting our own “computer world,” and Eno certainly knows Kraftwerk’s work well (being an early advocate of all things electronic and all things German). But Eno now lives in the computer world, and the jarring contrast with the “oil and steel” from the hellscape of World War I is set against the few benign fragments of “official language” that can be heard on the right/male channel: “This email and any files transmitted…”, “if you receive this email…”, “please notify the system manager” “this email contains confidential information” etc. It’s the everyday speech of our online lives, agreeing to give corporations personal information just so we can live more conveniently. Eno, an artist who has collaborated online for over twenty years now, is no stranger to this and purposely included such “extraneous” information in his work. 

The final two pieces on the album, “Fickle sun (ii) the hour is thin” and “Fickle sun (iii) i’m set free” return the voice front and center to the album. The former recalls the vocal experiments of Eno’s 2011 album Drums Between the Bells where various people read texts written by the poet Peter Holland. Like that record, the words are spoken by someone else. The lyrics were generated randomly by Eno feeding alternate, pornographic lyrics of patriotic war songs sung by soldiers during world war one. Pornography has always been a fascination of Eno’s: his first solo album was entitled Here Come the Warm Jets after Japanese water-sports films he had seen in the early 1970s. His first two releases, Jets as well as his collaborative album with Robert Fripp No Pussyfooting, featured pornographic playing cards on their covers. On “fickle sun (ii)” the source material is never made explicit, rather Eno transforms pornography into the most obscene form of expression: warfare: “Tired with what the world has yet brought forth,/ With the women waving at war,/ And the news that war is faith.” “Fickle Sun (ii)” is a continuation of sorts with a line from Eno’s collaborative album with David Byrne Everything that Happens Will Happen Today “when we fall in love with war.” “War is faith” speaks to the nationalism brought forth by the first world war, but it also (as with all the songs on the album) speaks to our current moment: whether it is the caliphate’s call to the faithful to commit jihad, or the West’s faith that continued drone bombings will make the world safer: war has become a doctrine of faith. 

The destruction and violence of the previous movement of “fickle sun” has been replaced with a quietude, musically recalling Eno’s earliest ambient albums. But the voice, as soothing as it is, remains persistent. It’s post-war, but it also anticipates the next one: “The phoenix broods serene above the tower of time./ Not enough boats./ He admitted without shame/ That he had entered into the dreams of the named addressee/ In the velvet of war.” The phoenix in Eno’s piece is similar to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: it stands above the “progress” of mankind, observing that there hadn’t been enough boats (we return, again, to the ship metaphor that began the album) to save those who fell and drowned. But unlike the angel of history, it was the phoenix itself who placed his figure in the dreams of those addressed in the “velvet” of war. He cannot fix the world because he is as responsible for the dreams of war as anything else: the dream of death and rebirth. But the dead at the bottom of the sea will not come back, no matter how much women might wave at war and no matter what doctrine of faith (AK-15 in a nightclub, drone bomber over Syria) we may hold, the dead cannot speak any more. 

But there is a detachment in both the music, the timbre of the voice and the lyrics which does not only mourn but seems to suggest a kind of peace, a true peace, after the death and destruction of the first movement. We are told that the phoenix feels “no shame” for having placed the velvet of war into the dreams of the named addressee. The piece continues: “Before ever there was writing, they were taking up stones/ To hurl at last stroke,/ But nobody looked back./ There were soldiers,/ There was a cradle.” Warfare predates writing, to imagine a world without warfare is a fools errand. Herein lies the final statement of the record (it’s final original statement, that is): while we can never turn back to an imagined pre-historic time wherein we haven’t been seduced by the velvet of war, we have a moral obligation to mitigate its effects: we have a moral obligation to make sure that the fewest amount of bodies end up at the bottom of the sea, that the fewest number of boys go to soldier. This is Eno as political artist: still using the random and the generative (and the banal and pornographic) to work out where he is as a commentator on current and previous politics. There will always be soldiers, but there will also always be cradles: one must remain cautiously optimistic in the face of horror. 

It is in this spirit of cautious optimism that the album ends. “Fickle sun (iii) I’m set Free” is a cover of the Velvet Underground’s song. It is elegiac but in a different way than the other pieces on the album: it is a tribute to Lou Reed, who passed away in 2013. Actually Eno had recorded the cover many years ago, but hadn’t released it until after Reed’s death. Eno has spoken eloquently on how much the VU’s music had meant to him, and is responsible for perhaps the most memorable quotation on the group (“The Velvet Underground didn’t sell many records in their time. However, everyone who bought a VU record started their own band”), as well as continuing a career-long collaboration with VU co-founder John Cale. Here, however, the cover isn’t just a tribute to a fallen mentor, but fits with the album’s thematics. We have violence: “I saw my head laughing/ rolling on the ground”, we have the faith of the faithless: “I’m set free/ to find a new illusion” and speaks to those who are imprisoned either through ideology or physical restraint: “I’ve been set free/ I’ve been bound”. The music is some of the most beautiful of Eno’s entire career: over strings, guitar and drums and multi-tracked vocals (Eno has a genuinely moving voice when he wants to use it) Eno describes a kind of hesitant transcendence: or, to put it another way, we’re always going to find a new illusion (war, refuge, freedom, capitalism, ambient music, art, love, etc.) that will replace the old one. If only, like the phoenix itself, we can embrace without shame the velvet dreams (horrible and beautiful) that make up our experience, we might be set free, if only to find a new illusion. 

3.

As I mentioned earlier, I would return to this notion of Brian Eno soundtracking birth. In our particular historical moment, with the multitude of streaming platforms, websites, lifestyle coaches, etc. we can transform our most intimate events into curated experiences. Though one would hardly want to fault people who want to have healthy, calming births in a relaxing atmosphere, what I have partly tried to do with this article is demonstrate, by critically engaging the interplay between ambient and capital, the way in which the music Eno developed in the 1970s has been deployed to not only create calm (whether in an airport, a bedroom, a museum or, yes, even a delivery room) but to manage life experiences closely connect with our bodies. In a sense, this is not that different from what the French philosopher Michel Foucault has attempted to describe with his work on biopower: to make live, and let die (here in almost to literal a way). Eno’s music, unofficially for the most part, has had a far more effective way of controlling the health of the population than Muzak or the endless parade of popular hits has ever had. Eno, by his own stated goals (“My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”), has always been aware of the palliative nature of his work. This isn’t to condemn Eno, but rather to critically engage what it means to have ambient music soundtrack our lives and to contrast that stated task with a more forceful politics espoused by Eno. 

In 2013, Eno unveiled a new project: a quiet room for the Montefiore hospital based on his 77 Million Paintings installation. Eno has become interested in the way his music and installations can promote healing, and specifically thought of the hospital in Motefiore because it takes 30% of its patients from National Health Service referrals. He has now started offering this service to other hospitals around the word for similar healing rooms which, as researchers have shown, “can produce improved psychological, physiological and biological outcomes of clinical significance in patient care.” As we can see, Eno’s project of ambient music has now begun to embody the very ideas first espoused in his earliest writings on ambient music, albeit with a twist: whereas the Eno of 1978 critiqued Muzak by stating “their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and leveling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms)”, the Eno of 2013 attempts something similar in hospital rooms. There is also alleviation in Eno’s 77 Million Paintings installation, one that might have just as great an impact on the body as Muzak did for “mundane tasks” back then.

Yet, it’s worth noting the change of venue: whereas the Eno of 1978 imagined ambient music being pumped into the gleaming terminals of the airport (an almost too perfect metaphor for the flow of capital and people) he now imagines ambient music to heal the body and rest the mind, significantly of those who might not be able to pay for that experience otherwise. The Brian Eno of the last couple of years has begun to use his music and art towards political ends, even if it often seems to be the same art that he has been creating for forty years.