808s, Pink Robots and Aesthetics

When I am lecturing, I use whatever examples I think will be useful to analogise new ideas.  Sometimes these includes example from hip hop.  In general, students find this hilarious, not only for the cultural clash between their expectations of what should be talked about at university and what should not, but also, I infer, for the clash between what I look and sound like and what hip hop looks and sounds like.  They do not know about pledge that the señor and I have made, that any children of ours will not forget about Dré.

I shouldn’t proffer a fan’s credentials too vigorously however, since in truth my enjoyment of braggadocio and stagey misogyny, not to mention attribution of good fortune to desert earned from Jesus, is of quite limited duration.  However, as a hound of popular culture, I do like to know who is releasing what, and with whom.  Jody Rosen is my strong ancestor in this, although I doubt I could ever write as insightfully about music as he does.  The other thing by which my curiosity about an album is piqued is mixed reviews.  If the Guardian, the New York Times and Slate can’t agree about it, I am tempted to seek it out.

So it is that over the last few years I’ve followed at a reader’s remove the career of Kanye West, who rise has been curiously underscored here by the frequent repeats of Chappelle’s Show, so that as each new album has been released, it’s still been possible to see him featured as an up-and-coming performer from Chicago in Chappelle’s musical segments.  (Now there is a man who has seriousness about, and enthusiasm for, hip hop.)  I noted the fringes-of-student-life titles of West’s albums (not least because in my job we deal daily with the consequences of late registration) not to mention the sad death of his mum last year.  More recently I liked very much indeed the ambivalence and melancholy of the single “Homecoming“, which was distinctive, for me, in that it featured a non-irritating use of the voice of Chris Martin.  The conflation of a city with a female lover isn’t new, of course, but I liked it as a new take on old material: the simple, diatonic keyboard figures and Martin’s light tenor, singing “do you think about me now and then” over West’s baritone rapping, in which the neglected lover/neglected city analogy is carefully overexplained.

Thus when I read the mixed reviews and heard the single from West’s latest album release, my interest was already piqued.  I like the soundscape in which electro overlays hip hop; each of the styles seems to me to offset the most posing excesses of the other.  I like passionately, perhaps without rational explanation, albums that respond to terrible heartache and loss; they are like culs-de-sac within which I can dream out the painful remnants of relationships that in my daily consciousness are dead and buried.  I’ve often thought, too, that if depression is a malfunctioning of the mind’s grief mechanism, then texts in which genuine grief is explored are particularly attractive to depressives: this is what pain feels like when it’s purposeful pain, pain for a reason.  The historical events that inspire sad music also confine it: we know that the performer’s pain will not ride high like this forever, whereas that possibility is the dark threat of depression, to grieve forever about nothing.

In these regards, I love this album.  It is full of robotic but hearty beats and scoring that even when heavy with synth-strings still sounds spare.  (I have listened to enough Beck and Outcast over the years to have a strong emotional attachment to the 808.)  Verse types of standard songwriting expression are disrupted with individual coinages.  If these teeter on the edge of bathos, it doesn’t matter, since this is precisely the risk we run when we attempt to express ourselves sincerely and with a deadline looming.  It is a thought I have been having more generally, that the difference between songwriting and poetry is often that the songwriter makes use of the received language that the poet is supposed to eschew.  A commonplace phrase or saying can be reanimated through a new set of sounds, made unique to that score.  Thus, in “Heartless”, there is the melancholy (auto-)story of the man who “far along this road … lost his soul / To a woman so heartless”, who gestures to the subtextual by noting “I know some things, things that you ain’t told me” but also that “I did some things but that’s the old me”, yet, when searching for the rhetorical question that will clinch it, can only ask, “How could you be so Dr. Evil?”.  It’s easy to laugh at that kind of tonal drop, but it seems to me also to gesture to the near-impossibility of turning our own pain into metaphors, even when the alternative–”how come we broke up?”–is too plain or painful to be spoken.

The thing that really sparks my imagination about this album, however, is the thing for which it is most criticised: that all the lead vocals are sung through auto-tune.  The spectre of T-Pain, whose bopping, gurning, jester-for-hire vocal schtick is recorded exclusively through the same device, thus threatens to sully this more serious project.  My response to it, however, is the opposite of, say, the Village Voice, which calls West “about the millionth post-T-Pain abuser of AutoTune”.  Why do I like it so?  My short answer is, The Flaming Lips.

The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was a seminal album for me, not least because of the daft yet complete world in which its songs take place, but also because of the way the album presented the chief risk for murderous robots: that they would quickly desire to learn to love, seeing it as the galvanising force of so much human contact, but at the same time only be able to achieve a polished simulacrum of emotion.  A side effect of this process in the album is that the robots develop moral reasoning, or at least an awareness of moral reasoning, and thus are unable to carry out their murderous mission: they have become aware of what it might mean if they were to cause pain.  In 808s and Heartbreak the effect of auto-tune is a kind of emotional opposite to this. The singer, the storyteller, in pain, mediates their storytelling through the robotising auto-tune, and thus achieves in sound at least the much-desired emotional distance from his suffering.  The Pink Robots approach closer and closer to mechanical humanity, whereas the broken-hearted hero of West’s album recoils from it.  It’s too painful.

What seem to be the real circumstances of the album’s making can be read as analogous to my account of its effect.  West desired to sing these tracks of pain and emotional weight but needed auto-tune to keep his intonation in line (the New York Times notes that “at the moment, Mr. West can’t sing”).  Thus, even as the sung lines should embody sincere expression, the auto-tune takes them back to that teetering moment of human/not-human that the robots in the Flaming Lips album experience.

This tipping-point is something of a key element in my aesthetic.  Art about pain is not the same as pain.  It is an ordered, crafted, often meticulous response to it.  It plays out, in altered form, the pain we can’t bear, and thus re-presents to us something we can stand instead, the art work.  We may make fun of teens and pre-teens who wed themselves to their headphones, who write lyrics on everything as examples of truth and suffering, but they’re engaged in the same project.  (I can’t talk: when I was twelve I had an exercise book in which I used to write Wham! lyrics, and when I was seventeen another in which I used to transcribe songs by Queen.)  The beloved song, the cherished lyric, the muted bombast of the 808 stand in for what we can’t stand.  We cling to them while we bear the unbearable, until that time passes and they become totems of what we withstood.