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Back online, hopefully for good. People joke about going into internet withdrawal... hiking in the backwoods or sailing on a yacht. But that's voluntary abstinence. It's not really withdrawal until you have no control over when you'll get your fix.
I realized today that the happiest moment of this trip occurred before I even left the states. It was the moment when I was packing and realized I wouldn't need to bring a single key with me. It was a feeling of lightness that sang.
Blog Link: Sasha Frere-Jones, pop music critic at the New Yorker, has a personal blog and a blog at the New Yorker. His brother, a font designer, writes a blog on fonts and design with his partner.
Song of the day: Big Girl by Ghostface Killah. Over-educated people who aren't feeling rap: this song rewards close listening. In a way, it recalls the Crystals' He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss). Carole King wrote "He Hit Me" to confront the issue of battered women knowing full well the Crystals would "sing it straight," like any other love song. In a bizarre way, bubble-gum pop is a fitting means to discuss abuse: a subject you'd rather avoid catches you off guard as the meaning of the song dawns on you. Its downright subversive.
Just so, Ghost's lyrics pose more and more dilemmas as you parse them. The song is on Fishscale, the album in which Ghost jumps on the bandwagon of the Cocaine rap fad. But on "Big Girl," all of the misogyny, machismo, and dealer talk (that rap usually provides in neat, single-serving packets) collide in a train wreck of unresolved vectors.
The storyline runs as follows: you have a vain dealer making a fool of himself over a woman he meets in a bar, a woman who is alluring despite having the disgusting symptoms of a serious cocaine addiction. They have the most fleeting and crass of interactions, but his thoughts weave off into a fantasia of their (non-existent) possibilities together. His fantasy is all the more heartbreaking for being so poorly conceived. A life of integrity and well-being is so removed from this scene that it can only be imagined in the most child-like of ways.
Ultimately, he dreams of nurturing her, notwithstanding the fact that he is a dealer and she a junkie. Its the hope of having a non-toxic relationship, a hope that collapses upon itself. He paints a future for her in which there is no place for either of them.
Plus, the production is ill. Withdrawal-as-metaphor-for-heartbreak in the sample becomes the heartbreak-of-debasement, the debasement of an entire community.
ps. If you think I'm reading too much into this song, check out Whip You With A Strap from the same album.
pps. the lyrics for the rap that I've linked above are wrong. I've always wanted to get in a discussion about this: how and why the lyrics posted on the internet for raps are so consistently shoddy.
