Blurred Lines II

So, in a previous post--Blurred Lines I--I asked why the song "Got to Give It Up" by Marvin Gaye (1977) came to me in a dream this week, and I implied that its surfacing is directly connected to my having heard Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" back in June of this year and again a little over a week ago. I didn't say in the previous post that I am not in the habit of dreaming of Marvin Gaye songs. Actually, my father wasn't that crazy about Gaye since he didn't like the sexual (read erotic) aspect of some of the later stuff; my father was a romantic in the more lovely sense of the word. So, either my father, whom I have called my psychic d.j., did not send forth this song, or he did but not merely for my listening pleasure.

What, then, does my subconscious self want me to do with the knowledge that Thicke's song is strongly influenced by Gaye's? Might I add that last night I gave some thought to other influences that I hear in the song and came up with Prince as the main influence on Thicke's falsetto? I went online and learned that not a few people have realized the same. Some think Michael Jackson is an influence as well, but I'm not yet able to discern anything beyond the "Hey," which I guess could be Jackson's "He he!" At a time like this, I need an ethnomusicologist. I know of two, and neither is available to me at the moment. If they were, I'd ask just how common this degree of influence is, which is beside the point of this post, or, well, maybe not. Okay, I know enough to recognize "Blurred Lines" as a pastiche, my term of choice for what others call a mashup. Again, there are in Thicke's recording several influences. It takes either a refined ear, age, or a little peace and quiet to tease them all out. Why bother? Well, one reason I can think of is that one is a fool if he or she thinks that there is anything new under the sun. What does it mean then to have a hit if that hit is a creative collage of old hits? I suppose it means that one has reassembled the old with the new very creatively, and I would admit that one is to be applauded for that. Most old heads would say that the originals were better. I dunno. I don't even know if I am an old head. What I do know is that the old music takes me back to a time, and I know that when I hear music from the past--an experience very much like Proust and the teacup or was it Didion and the teacups?--the essence of that time also comes back. When I first heard Thicke's song, I approached the past but did not become fully immersed in it, maybe because of the puzzle the music placed before me.

For months then, I think I suffered a bit of cognitive dissonance, a condition which may increase with age, but one which I suspect that more and more young people (am I young at 48?) suffer. (Incidentally, my mother, who is in her 70s, experienced such an episode recently, a sort of temporal confusion. She got stuck in her own constructed sense of time, which may actually mean that she's ahead in this game.) My own persistent dissonance has to do with living in, one, a culture that gives me much more to do and much more to consume than I reasonably can (which means I am cognitively overloaded all of the time) and, two, living in a culture in which truly nothing is original. My response to what I take to be postmodern facts of life is not to take on an air or claim of cultural superiority (I suppose Gaye's song wasn't pure either) but to feel disturbed by the possibility that most may not be able to tease out the differences for whatever reason--time poverty or choice to spend time on things that seem to matter more.

Take for instance last year's blockbuster slavery film Django Unchained. Now, I went in so hard on that film last year that I promised myself to give it a rest. Trying to get people to see that film as problematical was definitely a losing battle. Apparently, so long as you're Quentin Tarantino you can treat subject matter however you like, as bloody as you would like. It seems to me that a majority of people whose opinions I heard--that would include more than one man of the cloth--were not bothered very much by the violence, which was made acceptable by the "It's Tarantino" argument. I was surprised that these people did not offer (only a handful did) that slavery was violent every day. Had they done so, I would have countered with the fact that the violence of slavery was contextualized so that even in its barbarity, in the final analysis, one would be able to explain it, which is not the same of course as accepting or approving of it. With DU, the artistic and moral question is whether the violence made sense, as in, did it fit the specific context, or was it simply added for effect or pleasure. The latter possibility would be rightly called pornographic intent. (Decontextualized, obsessive, viewing is what pornography is I think.) About the time that I lost patience with the various ways in which people excused this very troubling film, I had even decided to hit below the belt, offering that Americans don't know enough about slavery to judge a film good or bad. This is a fact that is not in need of an argument, right? So, what have producers in effect done when they offer a historical film which precious few consumers have the knowledge to judge critically? In my opinion, this is an offense almost criminal, a compounding of ignorance. And what are the implications of that!? Worse than a compounding, however, is willy nilly exponential growth, multiple denominators whose only common thread is the refrain "It's just entertainment." Augh! Absent a critical thread, for example, "this film bears no resemblance to real slavery" or "why can't African American lives in film ever be given enough back story to create depth so that they might pass as something close to real?, Hollywood can produce just about anything it likes so long as we find it entertaining in one way or another--it make us mad, it cracks us up, puts us just briefly in touch with the past, in short, titillates rather than moves (us to action?) Amused to death (Postman), we are served up another slavery film this year.

And this folks it seems to me is the state of things and the state of our minds, overwhelmed with information, overloaded, hyper-entertained, which is why the whole idea of the "must see" film does make sense to us, and our friends--who, like us, have few critical bones left in their consenting heads-- tell us every other week that we simply must see movie x,y, or z, as though viewing films has become a life or death matter.

All of this returns me to the other issue at hand--how it is that my and, I suspect, everyone else's, subconscious would pull up for us what has been suppressed. Is it to take to task the information overloaders, the Lords of the Media, who are the ones doing the overloading and to much profit I might add? The answers from Jung are balance and that the subconscious has something to offer all its own. In this case, I think it wants to point me and others to what is real, or more real, which is to say closer to the source of the original experience; Gaye's song is a reminder of a different reality, more deeply sensual I think, closely knitted to a more soulful, less consumeristic time, you know, that Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored? (Taulbert) That was a very modern time, which, as social critics explain, may have laid a foundation for and anticipated this present time in which everything is a mashup and we haven't the time either to discern or to reconnect with the past at deeper levels. But my dream suggests that whether you have the time or not the past is always with us and will pop up when it is good and ready. Now, it is a matter of whether we will hear, see, or recognize it for what it is, which is not simply another layer of reality--but a sensuality and a spirituality that perhaps cannot be experienced richly in the postmodern world of so many things--but within the space or place of dreams and other psychic phenomena. Be that as it may, I have to admit that Thicke's song did stimulate my psyche. This function of "new" music must be worth something. But the lines are in fact blurred, and there is a politics and an economics to various acts of blurring. I am these days constantly reminded of Melville's wisdom--this world pays dividends. This explains so much, but I'm willing to believe that Thicke and Pharrell Williams were as musicians inspired by the artistry of Gaye, which is probably why they should go ahead and admit the influence and pay accordingly. In this case, sampling and, in effect, tweaking black people's experiences of joy and pain is a real money-maker. Worse, are "Blurred Lines," "Django Unchained," or "12 Years a Slave," placebos? Are they vaccinations, periodic inoculations with the pain of the past, in order to stave off real despair, deep reconnections with the various deep pains of inhumanities suffered? The answers to these questions are answerable, yes?