Growing up: Vince Staples and Miguel

Vince Staples – Summertime ’06

“I ain’t never ran from nothin’ but the police,” he boasts on “Norf Norf,” to the accompaniment of sonar bleeps that I swear I’ve heard on a Spring Heel Jack record. This 21-year-old occasional Odd Future mate has a high, strident voice, a vestige of a harrowing adolescence he wants to get past and an energy he needs to keep expending. His first official album has Clams Casino production credits like “Norf Norf” and the title track alongside No I.D.’s pillaging of faint tango beats and guitars (“3230”) and of Joy Division’s raptor squawks (“Like It Is”). It’s too long, and here and there it verges on the familiar (“Get Paid”) and the familiar and callow (“Hang and Bang”); but the crossover hopefuls flirt with dub (“Lemme Know”) and the album’s insistent menace destabilizes the percussion and Staples’ bearings. Not his clarity. The cavalcade of horrors on “Birds and Bees” comes down to a couple of simple found object observations: “They found another dead body in the alleyway” and “a gangster like my granny.” Like Miguel, contact with women doesn’t exactly warm his heart. “This could be forever, baby,” he repeats on “Summertime,” and it’s clear who needs the assurance.

Miguel – Wildheart

The California mythos gets a side eye on Wildheart. Cokey scenes and palm trees are nice. But: “Heart caught in a rift, cold pacific waters, sweet California,” he sings on “leaves,” as poignantly as Joni Mitchell did on her own jaundiced ode to the state. With a sensibility steeped in the Mamas & Papas as much as Tupac, Miguel Pimentel wakes up after an evening of love looking forward to coffee in the morning. A happy moment in a rueful storm cloud of an album, part of the tradition of success-has-spoiled-me follow-ups to breakthroughs. “Too black for the Mexicans, too square to be a hood nigga,” he spits in “what’s normal anyway” over burbling guitar, of which there’s lots on Wildheart, much played by Miguel himself. “We’re gonna die soon,” he sings on opener “a beautiful exit.” Even “chase the sun,” the tune that should be the “Purple Rain”-style climax—why else hire Lenny Kravitz to jizz a loud rawk solo?—is a pained valentine, boasting the saddest ooh-oohs this side of Bruce Springsteen’s Tunnel of Love, second side.

Miguel has never sung this well for so long, and Wildheart is a wonderful album, closer to one of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah releases than “Adorn”: a dense amalgam of sexual politics and personal apocalypse, of R&B balladry and singer-songwriter strum, of typographical oddities. Ravishing the otherwise ponderous “flesh” with his upper register, multitracking himself into a Miguel Army on “DEAL,” agitating his tenor on “leaves,” he tests the range of his emotive powers; he’s restless, unwilling to sit in any space too long. Two years of vestigial guest appearances should’ve sapped his recording fervor; for a success-has-spoiled-me follow-up Wildheart seethes with possibilities, is alive to the ridiculous. Sex for Miguel is a ritual choreographed to the signals sent by his lovers. He wants you to have sex with him, he’s pretty sure you’ll like it, he’s damn sure he’ll love it, and sharing this with you is part of his natural courtesy.

Rough justice

I’m one of the liberals who supported the death penalty into the early 2000’s. The state has a perfect right to take your life should it find you difficult of a capital crime, I thought. Then DNA became accepted, resulting in exonerations, apologies, and nothing when innocent suspects died. Then evidence that years in death row was no deterrent. Finally, I hadn’t thought about the question of doctors sworn to abide by the Hippocratic Oath devising novel means of killing people. As with guns, the death penalty is so entwined with people’s sense of righteousness and debt to survivors that a sea change more than Justice Stephen Breyer’s rhetorical questions. Most people don’t give a damn if a man convicted of a capital crime endures pain, especially if a relative was brutally murdered. It can be done, but it will take a grassroots effort that liberals from which liberals have heretofore recoiled.

Today’s decision in Glossip v. Gross, the lethal drug case, casts the Supremes as actors in a race to decide who can be cruelest. The central facts of Samuel Alito’s opinion:

As a legal matter, it is not at all clear why the actions of drug companies have any relevance whatsoever to a constitutional challenge to the death penalty. Drug companies are private actors, not government actors, so they are free to sell or not to sell whatever they choose so long as they comply with the law. Alito’s opinion, however, effectively punishes these drug companies for their opposition to the death penalty by holding that, should the companies continue to make their more reliable drug unavailable, then executions will just move forward with less reliable painkillers.

They key paragraph in Alito’s opinion is a declaration that, no matter what happens, there must always be a way to execute inmates

The onus is on drug companies to supply the kinds of cocktails that will most effectively kill the accused. As death penalty opponents, we don’t do a good job explaining why this method exacts revenge but has little to do with justice.

‘Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her’

An avid reader of a coffee table children’s Bible my grandmother had bought me in third grade, I was aware of Solomon’s seven hundred wives, Lot’s daughters drunken date rape of their father, the priests of Baal’s throats getting sliced by the river for worshiping this graven image, and, most cruelly, Yahweh prohibiting beloved Moses from entering the Promised Land because he disobeyed him (!). Savagery on par with the Greek myths I was reading but with the extra spice of compulsive piety sprinkled atop. I mean really, as Hitchcock would’ve said.

I make no political point by posting Juan Cole’s excerpting of several notorious passages. This gem I remember well:

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. But she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar; 2 so she said to Abram, “The Lord has kept me from having children. Go, sleep with my slave; perhaps I can build a family through her.” Abram agreed to what Sarai said. 3 So after Abram had been living in Canaan ten years, Sarai his wife took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. 4 He slept with Hagar, and she conceived. When she knew she was pregnant, she began to despise her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “You are responsible for the wrong I am suffering. I put my slave in your arms, and now that she knows she is pregnant, she despises me. May the Lord judge between you and me.” 6 “Your slave is in your hands,” Abram said. “Do with her whatever you think best.” Then Sarai mistreated Hagar; so she fled from her.

Out of the Hagar-Abram union came Ismael, father of the Bedouins and by extension Muslims, according to catechism. Cole screatches his head:

So let’s get this straight. Abraham isn’t said to have married Hagar. Apparently he and Sarah had separate property, because Hagar remains her slave. So he slept with someone else’s slave and got her pregnant. And then when that caused trouble between his wife and her slave, he washed his hands of his property-lover and let his wife mistreat her. As we know from 1 Peter, Hagar was supposed graciously to put up with this, but she was made of fiercer stuff than that, and you really have to root for her in this rather sick family situation.

He also investigates the claim from the New Testament that too vigorous a defense of a man’s interest by the wife may result in the amputation of her hand.

Say you’re at a bar and this big bald badass with tats starts smashing your face in. And say your wife likes you and wants to stop the guy from giving you a concussion. Say she reaches down and gets him by the balls. So the Bible would reward her for loyalty and bravery and fast thinking, right?

Nope. Now you have to cut off her hand. I mean have to. You’re not allowed to have a moment of weakness and think about how pretty her fingers are. Off with it, to the wrist.

Truly, traditional marriage was the ne plus ultra of commitment, fidelity, and compassion.

Fighting them by joining them: What Happened, Miss Simone?

When she finally appears onstage after seconds of enthusiastic audience applause, she has a glazed look, as if she had just awakened from a mummified state. The expression deepens. Does she know where she is? Does she know who she is? In closeup the head is as solid and massive as a marble statue’s. Teachers at the classical piano school to which she was denied admittance rebuked her as a child for having too full a set of lips, of looking “too black.” Then the incomprehension melts into something like pride. She remembers who she is, acknowledges that she deserve the applause. As it comes in waves — the audience has figured out she has snapped into place — she basks in it. She’s as imperious as a figure in a campaign poster. “Hello,” she says when she sits at the piano. Someone whistles. She smiles. “I haven’t seen you in many years — since 1968. I have decided that I will do no more jazz festivals. That decision has not changed. I will sing for you. I will share with you a few moments, after which I shall graduate to a higher class, I hope.”

Nina Simone had hoped to be the first black female classical pianist. After twenty years of worldwide fame as a song stylist, she never lost this ambition. The unsparing What Happened, Miss Simone documents how the tumult of the sixties and in Simone’s life thwarted her ambition. Swept up by the increasingly radical cast of the civil rights movement, bored by the gentility of the role in which she had cast herself, Simone fraternized with Stokely Carmichael and James Baldwin. Concerts became rallies in which she set homicidal fantasies about white America to spare musical accompaniment. “When they leave a nightclub where I perform,” she said in an interview. “I just want them to be in pieces.” Exhausted, convinced that no one understood her, she fled to Africa. Bipolar disorder triggered her erratic behavior, which included beating the daughter whom she had tried to protect from manager-husband Andy Stroud. Apart from several appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Simone remained a low key, ravaged presence mostly in Europe, adored by a fervent cult. She died in 2003.

Graced with excellent archival footage and its sources’ devotion to honesty, What Happened, Miss Simone traces how an artist schooled in one generation’s verities and modes of behavior discovered they were unsustainable; when she tried to put them back together again in the mid seventies the pieces no longer fit. This is the point at which the documentary, commissioned by Netflix, falters. For skeptics, What Happened, Miss Simone offers no explanations for her purported genius. I’m one of them. To my ears she had idiosyncrasies and a manner. The gentility she scorned was as much a part of her as her own skin, an emollient to an audience that wanted to hear standards not fucked with too much. By clinging to her unrealized dream of renown in the classical mode, Simone’s material never quite lost its mossy stolidness. Sometimes her scratchy contralto and piano chops gave the impression that they were recorded on two discrete tracks, refusing to converge or cohere; the voice wasn’t committed to the material besides lavishing it with the patented melisma and abrupt stops in phrases. But I have favorites: “Here Comes the Sun,”, “I Put a Spell on You,”, of course, the RCA album Nina Simone And Piano, “Mississippi Goddamn.” Her influence is vast and unceasing — John Legend as much as Lauryn Hill. The even more genteel Roberta Flack recast Simone’s folk overtones as R&B, and whaddya know, I prefer Flack.

But the arc of a life emerges in director Liz Garbus’ rendering. It’s clear she should have been called Miss Goddamn when she reached adulthood, with or without the radical politics. Stroud often beat her, once allegedly ramming her against a concrete wall. “He actually thinks I want to be hit,” she wrote in a diary, and to its credit the documentary hints at a sadomasochistic side. “I think they were both nuts,” Lisa Simone says. “My mother was Nina Simone 24/7,” she says earlier in the picture, addressing a born star’s cult of self. Lorraine Hansberry gets her due credit as influence. I would have liked to watch the genesis of her late eighties fame: an English Chanel No. 5 commercial that catapulted “My Baby Just Cares for Me” into the top five. It marked the selling of Nina Simone as paragon of cool, similar to Miles Davis’ own adverts and “Miami Vice” appearance. She did get an honorary degree from the institution that denied her admission as a child, and, in the eyes of an uncomprehending press watching cities burn, leaders die, and presidents resign, became the “rich black bitch” that she’d wanted to be when she started. Talk about realizing career ambitions.

Yeeeargghhhaaaahh

A few weeks after Ornette Coleman’s death, I wanted to honor him with a little known recording. Besides, it’s never a wrong time to praise Yoko Ono’s early seventies peak. Happy Sunday

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BH55H0 Rings

The column I’ve been waiting for. Rebecca Traister:

But the other thing that’s so revolutionary about fighting for marriage to be about love and companionship – and not about a strictly gendered economic or social power construct – is that it acknowledges human connections that are also available to millions of people outside of marriage altogether. There is an abundance of romantic love and sexual partnership enjoyed by couples who choose not to marry, by people who co-habit or co-parent or co-exist happily. There are also powerful networks of support and stability between friends, individuals who may not have encountered, or chosen not to commit to, a traditional romantic partner.

Our world is full of single people who are gay and straight and bi, people who have full, busy lives, who do work that is important to themselves and to others; who take care of people and who are taken care of by others; who enjoy pleasures and disappointments with the same intensity as their married compatriots, who break hearts and have their hearts broken; who give birth to and raise children. These millions of people now have more freedom – thanks to lots of social movements, including the one that has brought us legal gay marriage – to live these full, varied lives without being anyone’s wife or husband.

Marriage isn’t coercive, and our hetero friends offering social media support shouldn’t be faulted for wishing the best for us; but the good intentions translate into invitations to a ceremony whose assumptions aren’t being tested. Maybe gays marrying will inject the necessary bacillus allowing the institution to metamorphose into one in which avoiding children and the allowance of sexual partners — always with mutual consent — become acceptable options. When our grandparents practiced open relationships, it was the man who opened and the woman who suffered.

Moving on

To the friends who’ve married in the extraordinary last couple of years, I congratulate your freedom to move to any state in the country; its government must acknowledge your marriage. I don’t march in parades or change Facebook photos because I’m a prig. A good friend yesterday lamented the subtext of Anthony Kennedy’s decision — the peroration that everyone on Facebook has pasted but to me reads like Tony needs a tumble off Purple Mountain (Anthony Kennedy has been modeling for the ten dollar bill since 1992). I won’t cite it. But there is something to my friend’s recoiling from the notion that marriage saves humanity from loneliness and despair. My life is full and I have no intentions of marrying, not when the woods are lovely, dark, and deep and I have books to read and movies to watch and cocktails to drink and friends to love.

Now let’s move on to ENDA, whose passage is stalled and with this congress will likely remain so but then gay marriage did too in 2006. As conservatives shift from insulting homosexuals outright, the religious liberty argument will get louder, hence the necessity of workplace protection.

Madonna and the problem with ‘aging gracefully’

I liked Rebel Heart. I wish “Unapologetic Bitch” had been a #1 hit; it’s better than “Justify My Love,” but because her cultural moment looks as dowdy as baggy jeans no one will acknowledge it. Getting hits is hard for everyone, chart watchers will say. But because she’s the icon to whom pop stars still compare themselves I gotta take her failures more seriously. Maura Johnston:

She’s faltering because she’s operating in a time when superculture and counterculture are not only collapsing into one, thanks to forces including but hardly limited to the way in which media is conceptualized and subsequently disseminated; at the same time, attempts to appropriate underground culture are (rightly) scrutinized more visibly than they have been in the past.

No woman in the history of pop music has ever looked as fit as Madonna — not Barbara Streisand, not Donna Summer, not anyone. This fact forces commentators to find ever more novel terms to deal with a fiftysomething woman who evangelizes about sex and loneliness but hires trainers. If writers, i.e. men, will stop thinking it’s bizarre for a rich fit women to feel lonely and lust after guys, we — the men who are listeners and programmers — may remake pop radio habits, not to mention rock crit habits.

I have weaknesses too. Even in this landscape I expect Madonna to return with a single so necessary that it rewrites the rules about how a woman in her fifties should respond to and absorb cool new sounds. But this is a pipe dream. Her moment is gone. She exists as a radio and car programming presence, a reminder of how the will to power resonated as dance pop. I miss her. Perhaps because she presents her physical fitness as an act of nature that transcends attention and the scope of vitamins, Madonna’s dying would crush me like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston’s didn’t. To be more blunt, if Madonna were to die tomorrow I’d cry like I didn’t for Michael Jackson.

PS: “Bitch I’m Madonna” this week became her first Hot 100 charting hit since 2012.

Singles 6/26

After two straight weeks of marvels, I was due for a slough. Fetty Wap and Kevin Gates reveal that they’re mortal, Leona Lewis that Adele is still a sthing, and Jean-Michel Jarré that he’s alive in theory. Maybe this explains my affection for the only Weeknd single I’ve embraced, ready for Abel Tesfaye to break my heart and call me a whore because I committed the mortal sin of sharing my heart. That it’s rising on the charts suggests listeners agree. The same goes for Sam Hunt, whose album has hung in there long enough for me to give “Take Your Time” a reconsideration. For all the talk about hip-hop influencing country, I don’t hear enough about boy bands doing it too. “House party” shows somebody’s been listening to One Direction and is all the better for it.

Click on links for full reviews.

The Weeknd – Can’t Feel My Face (7)
Sam Hunt – House Party (7)
Honey Cocaine ft. DJ Carisma – Sundae (7)
Alessia Cara – Here (5)
Fetty Wap – 679 (5)
Kevin Gates ft. August Alsina – I Don’t Get Tired (5)
Natalie La Rose ft. Fetty Wap – Around the World (4)
Jay Park ft. Ugly Duck – Mommae (4)
Leona Lewis – Fire Under My Feet (4)
Chris Janson – Buy Me a Boat (4)
Jean-Michel Jarre & M83 – Glory (4)
Krept & Konan ft. Jeremih – Freak of the Week (3)
Lawson – Roads (2)
Zedd ft. Jon Bellion – Beautiful Now (2)
MustardMayo ft. Iamsu!, Marc E Bassy & Symba – Got U (2)

The smell of defeat

What reaction looks like. Michael Poterma:

I’m not saying merely that if Bork hadn’t been rejected, President Reagan wouldn’t have appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote today’s opinion: I think that if Bork had been on the Court, that platform would have given him an outsized opportunity to influence America’s cultural and constitutional discussion – and that America would have been significantly less likely to embrace the sort of the change the Court affirmed today.

History is of course fiendishly complicated, and this sort of counterfactual is impossible to prove. What if, instead of my hypothesis, the American people came to dislike Justice (or eventual Chief Justice!) Bork intensely, and as a result moved even faster in the direction of anti-originalist “living-Constitution” views? But I submit that, in my experience, even legal scholars who are in strong opposition to Bork’s views recognize that he would have been one of the most ferociously intelligent and effective justices ever to serve on the Court. He would, in my opinion, have been a game-changer.

FOX’s Greta van Susteren and Martha MacCollum:

“We’re just trying to think about the ramifications when a precedent is set, what it means down the road, right?” MaCallum said in an interview with Fox host and legal analyst Greta Van Susteren.

“So, suppose three people say, we want to be a marriage. We’re three people, we love each other and we want to be married. What’s to prevent that under this?”

“I don’t know that there is,” Van Susteren said. “I mean, that will have to wind up to the Supreme Court.”

“But, you know, a lot of things have changed. The culture is, you know, for whatever reason, they’ve changed,” Van Susteren continued. “They have different views of things.”

Clarence Thomas’ dissent:

Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved.

The ‘cynically manufactured and meritless argument’ of the King v. Burwell plaintiffs

Reading John Roberts’ majority opinion on the bus this morning, I was struck by the glee with which he skewers Antonin Scalia for the associate justice’s willingness to ignore statutory intent for the sake of his politics. This is called cynicism. Linda Greenhouse caught it too:

Who said that we “must do our best, bearing in mind the fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme”? Why, it was Justice Scalia (actually quoting an earlier opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor) in a decision just a year ago.

And who said that “a provision that may seem ambiguous in isolation is often clarified by the remainder of the statutory scheme” because “only one of the permissible meanings produces a substantive effect that is compatible with the rest of the law”? Why, Justice Scalia again.

In this instance,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “the context and structure of the Act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.” He concluded: “A fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.”

“Justice Scalia derided the majority opinion as a ‘defense of the indefensible,’ Greenhouse concludes. “But what would be truly indefensible, I believe the chief justice and Justice Kennedy came to understand, was the Supreme Court itself, if it bought a cynically manufactured and meritless argument and thus came to be perceived as a partisan tool.” Because a faculty senate meeting is run with greater comity than Congress these days, what once would have taken a mere motion to correct the Affordable Care Act churns into an incoherent rebel yell for the sake of an aging white population that needs good health care more than I do.

John Roberts: he ain’t goin’ nowhere

With the Affordable Care Act ruling, a big one regarding disparate impact in Fair Housing Act cases, and a likely affirmation of a right to marry gay coming next week, Anthony Kennedy is gunning for most hated man in the conservative blogosphere. But don’t mistake the Chief’s intentions:

But it is of a piece with everything else the Court has done under Roberts, from school desegregation, to affirmative action, to most notoriously, voting rights. Roberts, it appears, has declared his Day of Jubilee and he’s sticking to it. He cut his teeth as a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department as a lawyer dedicated to rolling back the legislative achievements of the civil-rights movement. On that issue, he has changed not at all. In the context of recent events, and considering that he’s likely to be chief justice for decades, that’s pretty damn depressing, even on a pretty good day.

Keep your eyes on this smiling man.