I found this article today in the New York Times newspaper. Remember our discussion about the wonderful period when hip-hop just beginning and artists were free to develop wherever guys like Bambaata, Herc, Grandmaster Flash, Melle Mel and others wanted to take it.
It’s not as if I made some principled choice not to listen to it. It’s just that Beyoncé released “Formation” on a Saturday, and then performed it at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and as of Monday I hadn’t gotten around to it, for reasons that are incredibly uninteresting: I happened to have been doing other stuff, which seems as if it’s probably among my rights as an American.
By then, though, the song had become such an intense focus of discussion at the digital water cooler — to the point where it felt difficult to turn on a computer without someone’s views about “Formation” and its various sociopolitical valences reaching out and grasping for your throat — that my not having heard it acquired some kind of political dimension. A decision had to be made. Either I needed to dutifully consume this object of conversation and develop an opinion about it or I needed to develop a defense of why I hadn’t yet done so.
The point being: Here, for a moment, was music that actively dragooned me into paying attention to it, based not primarily on sound, performance or composition, but on the rolling snowball of perspectives, close readings and ideological disputes accreting around it.
It’s songs that do this now; individual songs and mass opinion, working in tandem. This wasn’t always the case. We’ve spent the past century or so trying, in creaky and convulsive ways, to figure out what music is even for, and how we intend to use it. When and where will we listen to it? Will other people be there? Should people own music? Who should write it — the performers? What’s a normal amount to release at once? How will we find out about it? Will there be pictures? Are you absolutely, definitely sure we have to pay money for it? For the moment, there’s only one answer to these questions that seems to connect strangers in a truly monocultural way: We shall gather in huge, fawning riots around towering pop singles to trade politicized takes on them.
It’s not the worst thing. One of the great tricks of pop music is that no matter how much we like to imagine it’s about musicians expressing themselves, it tends to be more useful as a way for listeners to figure out their own identities: Each song lets us try on a new way of being in the world. For a long while, the idea was that young people could use music to shape their style — their clothes, their haircuts, their sense of cool. Then came high-speed Internet and a touching enthusiasm for the idea of playlists: With so much of the world’s music at our fingertips, we’d express our intelligence and taste by playing D.J. and curator, sorting through songs to assemble our own reflections. That didn’t last, either. Showing off your eclectic, handpicked treasures? This has become such a common online performance that there’s no one left in the audience.
So these days it’s the song, and the scale of the event surrounding it. One song, one digestible thing, with millions of people standing in a circle around it, pointing and shouting and writing about it, conducting one gigantic online undergraduate seminar about it, metabolizing it on roughly the same level that cable-news debate shows metabolize a political speech. This is an ever-greater share of the public life of music. A song like “Formation” isn’t set up as a story, or an interior monologue — it’s set up as Beyoncé, the public celebrity whose biography you already know, addressing the world, like an op-ed with drums. Thus can we argue not about what the song says to us, but about what we think the rest of the world needs to be told, and whether Beyoncé is telling it right. What do we make of her dancers’ Black Panther styling? Is she “allowed” to work with beloved artists from New Orleans or use references to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? How does the song sound through a feminist lens, through a queer lens, through an anticapitalist one? Can we have a conversation about her daughter’s hair, and also about police violence? People talked about these things until, three days in, I’d been quoted every last line of a song I still hadn’t heard.
We’ve found a way to collect around the handful of songs we all have in common, yoke them with our opinions and make a (mostly) joyful noise. I don’t begrudge Beyoncé or the world one second of it. But it does throw into stark relief the things we have a much harder time talking about, at least with strangers: the way songs make us feel, the things we discover in them that aren’t already on other people’s minds, the obscure pleasures we’re willing to risk trying to explain from the darkness. The ever-larger private life of music. How do we talk about that? ♦
Nitsuh Abebe is a story editor for the magazine and a former music critic for New York magazine and Pitchfork.
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