December 31, 2008
single number one: five paragraph essay
1) “Paper Planes,” M.I.A.; “Paper Planes” (Diplo Street Remix feat. Bun B & Rich Boy); “Paper Planes” (DFA Remix)”; “Straight to Hell,” The Clash; “Swagga Like Us,” T.I. and Jay-Z (feat. Jay-Z and Lil Wayne)
First things first: from an ’07 album, “Paper Planes” strikes us overwhelmingly as the song of 2008, and not at all because it seemed to haunt every third film soundtrack, and not especially because the "Homeland Security Remixes" were released this year with their sequence of astonishing versions, each of which reorients the song in its own way and still fails to elude the song’s massive, centerless gravity. It is the song of 2008 because it was good to listen to during the peak of the financial crisis. It is the song of 2008 because its sheer presence — not its subject, but its circulation — was both symptom and diagnosis of the situation. It is the song of 2008 mostly because the song in one form or another became improbably ubiquitous and then some, moving a million digital downloads, crossing demographics, reaching the bourgeois and rocking the boulevard. It wasn’t as popular in absolute numbers as any number of songs, but its relative popularity reverberated as a mysterious surplus. And that surplus, the condition of possibility for "Paper Planes" to exceed itself, is the surplus of 2008: a surplus of misery, of the awareness of misery, of the awareness of misery as an outcome of inevitable systemic fuckage, and of the dawning awareness that it must change. This is the moment of optimism is that otherwise dread-laced toomuchness wound sinuously through public space in a song whose hook was a semiautomatic and a cash register blent together into a single motion, the coordination of power that scales to every level — and who could decide if that sound was the corner or the world, Bun B and Rich Boy’s scrapey game or DFA's digitized assay of impersonal, imperial force? Both, duh — it was about how collusion, coercion, shake-ya-ass synchronization get solicited at every stratum, for better and mostly for worse.
Let’s call it hegemony funk.
The song was local-global all by itself, that’s the thing. In that sense it is at once a splendid ambassador for Kala but is at the same time not of it — the album depends on each song being a partial moment and motion in the album’s larger circulation, its situation, and “Paper Planes” works all by its lonesome: a failed song, a great single. This results in real critical problems, as it happens. For example: there are several great moments in “Paper Planes”: my favorite is the moment in which Maya sings, in her inimitable sing-song, “sum-sum-summer-summer…” chirpy and upbeat, echoing a million other pop odes to summertime, somewhere amidst The Jamies’ “Summertime Summertime,” The Cars’ “Summer,” and maybe T-Squad’s “No Sleep Til Summertime.” And then she finishes the phrase and you realize she was saying something else all along, “some some some are some are murdered, some are some are let go” and that the song has just whipped you around the sharpest turn a piece of music can make, delight/death, pop/polemic, and that every moment of this song is just as extraordinarily thought out….and as we said this is a real critical problem, because to identify M.I.A. by moments is to get it wrong, she is the only person making records that matter, not even albums but systems, structures — the album is dead, that’s for sure, and it has to get smaller like singles or bigger like the world picture. This is the intensifying logic of the local-global, of the patch of history we are watching burn, and not much music has been up to the challenge, not much has succeeded at both reaches. Maybe only her.
The Oughts will surely be discussed as music’s balkan decade, when the center of the industry could not hold, and microgenres and distributed communities imagined and mapped onto each other — and that story won’t exactly be wrong. But it will be missing some crucial shit. For one thing, this claim is probably more significantly true about the Nineties. The Eighties consolidated themselves under the rule of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and for a hot minute it looked like the Nineties would form an ellipse around the foci of Kurt and Dre, but both of them biffed it in their own ways and it was about then that the Modern Balkanized Era began. But that story, a little bit right, is wrong too — or, rather, it’s true from a particular position which still, to this day, does a pretty decent job of passing itself off as no position at all, just common sense. In fact, and we guess this is the point if there is a point, the story of decline and disintegration since 1994 is not the story of pop music in general but pretty much the story of rock. For of course the counterstory of hip-hop’s increasing permeation, coordination and domination of the Western market is equally true, and the mutations within hip-hop proper are massive and astonishing and nothing compared to the mutations within r’n’b, soul, rock, teenpop et al to adapt themselves so they could breathe in hip-hop’s atmosphere. What mostly retained its own genealogy was, clearly enough, country, which continued somehow not to be “pop music” (perhaps for this very reason). As a result, much of what had come to characterize rock had no choice but to flee into country, not the least of which would be the guitar solo, the long melody line, the sing along chorus, ripped jeans, and the narrative of starting a band. Country hasn’t become rock, as some like to say by way of explaining to themselves why they are willing to discuss country now; it has absorbed that part of rock that hip-hop didn’t. And so the last thing we mean to say is that the last decade of what gets bracketed under “pop” has seen titans, less than a handful but that’s about right, and not a one of them is white. And but maybe for Timbaland (and he remains a strange case, since the charisma of the performer remains real when we are talking about “mattering” in this social sense) you can find them all on a single song from 2008. None of them are named T.I.
Indeed, by now we can all probably admit that T.I. is third-tier at best, struggling to keep pace with Slim Thug and Keak da Sneak. Thus he stands out like a sour thumb on what is basically his own song, “Swagga Like Us.” Sugarhigh! has never much liked Kanye — for all his track appeal, we prefer writers who can write and rappers who can rap — but the shadow he has cast over the short millennium, well, one ignores it at one’s peril, and Mr. West deserves a little swagger. And yet. There are probably only three pop stars who can legitimately look back on the last decade and declare “No one on the corner has swagger like us,” and two of them are Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, for all the former’s lost glory and the latter’s allergy to the studio system. Finally T.I.’s absurd keyboard pomp made sense as something more than the survival of Procol Harum as a darker shade of pale: coronation music for the last kings standing. So: Jay and Weezy peer out from “Swagga Like Us,” astride the decade like the twin collosi of Memnon, but they don’t open the song, or close it down, or provide the hook. No, natch, that duty falls to M.I.A., sampled from “Paper Planes,” because "Swagga Like Us" — more or less a failure but at the same time very close to being the truth of the last ten years — would have no claim on the truth without her.