I moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 1982 with the intent of learning if I could make it there - thinking that if I could, I could make it anywhere... The New York that I entered was hot and felt very dangerous and inhospitable. It was a challenge to find a place to live and a job. And there was a song that was blaring out of every boom box on every subway and stoop - or so it seemed. It had a new beat and seemed to capture something of the urban scene that was essential. It was Grandmaster Flash's "The Message", a rap/hip-hop song that captured both the pride and the desperation of life in the ghetto - a life far more difficult than the one that I was struggling to establish with a college degree and backing of friends and family. It was a song that promised a new way of articulating the experience of those on the margins. As desperate as it was, there was a certain hopefulness that if this experience could be articulated - if we could know and communicate what people were experiencing, that message could be harnessed. Moreover, if people were able to resonate with this music that had an inherent message of a need for change, there was a chance that a genre of music could be developed that would lead to the kinds of changes that could make the message of the music unnecessary.
This was certainly neither the first nor the last time time that a clarion call would come from popular music - a clarion call that promised that art could lead us to a different kind of living. I imagine that people must have heard a similar ache in the songs of Woody Guthrie and then, a generation later, from Bob Dylan. The rock and roll songs of the sixties - perhaps epitomized by the Woodstock gathering, promised a new way of being - although the message of this group was less focused than previous movements and was supported by the musical industries in ways that were not always clear to those who were consuming the message in the music. Of course this is probably true of each of the movements. And one of the questions is whether the message can "survive" being put in the market place for people to have access to it. As one of my cynical professors put it, the summer of love went off the rails when the guys who just wanted sex showed up.
I am currently pretty inured to popular music. I am "forced" to listen to it by my teenage daughters, who are seemingly able to memorize lyrics to a myriad of songs that are about love - and the mechanics of love - that sometimes embarrass me to listen to (a later post, also relevant to the themes here, charts a rapprochement around Hozier). OK, as an analyst I shouldn't be embarrassed - but as I listen to them crooning unselfconsciously about actions that I don't think they would, in fact, actually engage in, I wonder about the power of music - is it to get us to do something we ordinarily wouldn't? To articulate something we consciously believe? To articulate something we believe but haven't yet articulated to ourselves or to anyone else? To convince us that we believe something we don't? I suppose it is all of these and more, but I think the power of the artist is actually to interpret their own experience in a way that we can resonate with - to know that we are not alone. And isn't it ironic how frequently those songs are about the experience of being in love? As if we need permission to say the thing that is most human - as if we need - which of course we do - support to say the most terrifying thing there is to say.
Just sixteen when she wrote and performed this song, including all the vocal tracks, Ella Yelich-O'Connor whose stage name is Lorde, has taken a hip hop idiomatic beat and layered an ironic response to the material worshipping popular culture; noting her own more simple background, noting that she has never seen a diamond in the flesh, she's not proud of her address, and that, in response to a culture that is advertising luxury items like Grey Goose and Jet Planes, she is seeking a different kind of buzz - the one that comes from being not royal by blood, but an appointed ruler - becoming another's queen bee. This deliciously ambiguous title - is she a lover? The leader of a colony? - is a fantasy that is somehow based in relationships with people - real people - in her life, not with the images and tokens that would be foisted on her. And yet it is a fantasy - just as the world of Maybach's and Tigers on a gold leash - is a world of fantasy. It is a creation engaged in by two or more people that creates something literally and figuratively fantastic - the feeling, captured by the swelling vocals, of being royal.
I am curious to find how this voice finds itself, and how the artist carries herself as she is exposed to the very world that she decries - as she becomes one of the heralds of the pop culture that she is (or was) trying to remain an outsider to. So far she seems to be saying the right things, but I suppose the machine that would promote her would not let her say things that weren't consistent with the voice that she has brought to the task...
When I started this post a few weeks ago, this was a new song on the pop charts. Since then, the song has gone to number one on the alt rock charts – the first female artist to achieve this position in some time, apparently, but it is still being played on the pop stations. It will be interesting to see what kind of cross over this song, and, over time, this artist’s vision will be able to create – who will she connect with and what will she articulate. Will she continue to be able to articulate the experience of living on the margins as she is brought more and more into the mainstream? How well can we hang onto our former lived experience to inform our current production as we move forward in our lives? The psychoanalytic position and experience is that this is the bedrock of who we are and that, in spite of new influences, considerable portions of that original experience will remain. We’ll see how the two combine to create whatever she will from here. And see how it influences those who listen to her – other artists and her public. Will we all come to recognize our wish to be royal? Or will her new found royalty wall her off from us? Will she be a Grandmaster Flash in the pan, or will her queenship prove to long lived, Lordeing it over us for some time.
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To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
