important development for historicizing this blog and also about turnin me on

like always ive been away for way too long and i apologize but i want to take this opportunity to perform two actions one of which ive been sitting on for quite some time and another that has just come to my attention the latter of which will go first and so as some of you know i took it upon myself to repost all of the previous blog entries a bit ago which effaced certain built in modes of historicization by which i mean say for instance one wanted to know how long i spent between my fourth and fifth posts at this current juncture there is no way to do it however with the surfacing of this picture anyone can now retroactively discover certain facts about the state that this blog existed in before the revamp now the second thing which i want to discuss is the song turnin me on specifically the opening lyrics and their repetition fly as hell swagga right brown skin poppin now the question of repetition itself is very important insofar as it accounts for a beautiful series of subtle turns and dips and almost balletic movements in the song lollipop off the album the carter iii but in this particular case the beauty is one of appropriation which is another meta interesting phenomenon as you all probably know by now but in it the repetition of that first line serves to indicate that the role is being assumed and it does so in a move apparently dissimilar but deeply related to the one in the song with t pain so that has to be taken into account but more importantly for my purposes in this moment the twisting out from under the falsely positive or empowering nature of the song preceding it one of many sung by female pop artists who are trying to align themselves more with alanis morissette than fergie but in adhering to the formula that it sets for itself limits the possibility of it saying anything interesting by circumscribing itself within a format which only allows her to express satisfaction in the non material or chivalrous and dissatisfaction in the grossly material which is repeated very often in cultural moments so being caught in both this formula and in the broader cultural circular logic seem to be the fate of this song along with so many others but that repetition that crystal clear moment of appropriation and insight slash dredging up from the interpretive to the immanent it is in that beautiful moment that the song escapes from that necessarily being its totality and instead becomes something rife with potential where meaning is made to splinter and reconfigure kaleidoscopically

self awareness song

im going to break form a bit here and talk about a song called cant believe it by t pain it is very plainly disguised as a generic radio pop ballad in the vein of what has come to be thought of as the pop version of r and b or hip hop now the song essentially tells of the encounter between a man and woman from the mans perspective and the man then goes on to describe the various places to which he desires to allow her to take vacations ie a beach house in costa rica after t pain goes on for some time in this vein describing essentially the ability of his affluence to transport this young woman he finds desirable into what are essentially idyllic locations the line i can send you down south is rap slash sung and i think this is the perfect example of the kind of self awareness that is so important to hip hop and makes it such an important and useful artefact i mean listening to the song it is pretty apparent that there is underlying the banal love story issues of outsourcing and of deferment but that line both drags this issues explicitly to light with the particularly non idyllic destination provided which casts the others into relief and then on top of that it also introduces a very specific lineage which before hearing this line could only be inferred from the artists and the consideration of genre and the songs place of origin namely that of american slavery and being sent down the river and so on which with this line goes from an unspoken idea haunting it to an idea present within the text in a line which is delivered with a flair which allows for both the comedy of it to be evident and for it to be subsumed as part of the song effectively co opting the idea and making it not only an observation within the song but an integral aspect of the song which point i think is particularly interesting in that it does not succumb to the didactic impulse that would seem to necessarily follow such a crucial movement in ideas of the song instead it is simply presented and used as a jumping off point which i think is incredibly fascinating now the whole song is fascinating obviously but to conceive of it in such an autotheoretical fashion is just a point which i dont imagine most people read it with even though it is quite clearly present i mean it would be hard to argue that the reason that this line is there is completely coincidental and would require a pretty childish or racist presupposition of the ignorance of the artist in order to make this argument