Ann Powers, Good Booty

The real reason American popular music is all about sex is that we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music. This music, infinite in its variety, is rooted in the experiences of people who made a new nation within a dynamic of unprecedented mobility, horrific exploitation and oppression, constant mixing, and the ongoing negotiation of limits. From colonial times onward, the sounds that inspired dancing and loud sing-alongs in the streets, in ballrooms, in bars, an in people’s homes exuded erotic energy and often directly discussed the problems and possibilities of sex and love that people were facing in their times. This was always rhythmic music, too, grounded in those drumbeats carried from Africa within enslaved people’s bodies, because their instruments had been taken from them. They stomped and slapped out its meanings in ways that were arousing and miraculous. Popular music’s very form, its ebb and flow of excitement so closely resembling the libido, drew people to it as a way to speak what, according to propriety, couldn’t be spoken.

And always, this music was a mix, and about mixing. It arose from those streets and semi-private places as a product of Afro-Carribbean, European, Latin American, and native cultures colliding and mingling. Xxi-xxii

Music has created the spaces where Americans can publicly share deep experiences of selfhood and connection. Through the drum and the guitar and the electronic thrum, peple feel their own physical drives and longings for emotional connection. Rhythm is quite literally the reason. It’s the musical element that guarantees what scientists call “entrainment”—the merging of two ongoing processes, like a heartbeat and a drumbeat. Scientists also call this “coupling”: forgetting where one ends and the other begins. The musical experiences of entrainment unites a listener with what is being played, the performers playing it, and everyone around her enjoying it, too; it encourages identification and produces sympathy. Entrainment is the reason people dance and what makes them feel a song speaks for them. (xxviii-xxix)

European, African, and Latin traditions mixing: 9

Beyonce and Creole culture: 36

Ragtime and sycopation: 46

Creole Songs: 21-27

Tiarney Miekus

The problem with “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” is that it roots music criticism in either music or writing, when music writing is actually rooted in the subjective response of the writer. Music criticism is never about the music or writing, but is always that barely graspable purgatory: the experience of the music. Those with the conviction that music writing is objective, or should somehow aim for objectivity (the real impossibility), are probably basic enough to say something like, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.

Beyoncé and The Dixie Chicks, “Daddy Lessons”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj1T7uHdBcY

Lil Nas X, “Old Town Road” ft. Billy Ray Cyrus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7qovpFAGrQ

Clipping., “The Deep”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EnPFsk4lOo

[Intro]
Our mothers were pregnant African women thrown overboard while crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships. We were born breathing water as we did in the womb. We built our home on the sea floor, unaware of the two-legged surface dwellers until their world came to destroy ours. With cannons, they searched for oil beneath our cities. Their greed and recklessness forced our uprising. Tonight, we remember.

[Verse 1: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember how deep it go
Started from the bottom
Y’all remember how deep it go
‘Fore y’all had to come back, deep
Y’all remember when it used to be deep
So deep, so, so deep, ayy
When y’all swim up out yo’ mama while y’all mama was asleep
So deep, so, so deep, ayy
And y’all remember when y’all had the dance floor lit, dark
No two-step, deep, y’all don’t even sweat, deep
As deep as it gets
Dreaming dead asleep and keeping time
Y’all heartbeat, deep, y’all heartbeat, deep
And all the fishes had they eyes bugged out
Cause y’all dancing underwater and y’all don’t get wet
And the dark smelled sweet and y’all tails touch reef
Y’all feed off the bottom, but now y’all remember

[Chorus: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember
Y’all remember

[Interlude 1]
Pressure outside the vehicle: 832.2 bars

[Verse 2: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember when the deep got hot when y’all move on up
How y’all used to argue ’bout the water getting warmer
Still y’all loved a little bit of light up in the deep
So deep, so, so deep, ayy
Y’all remember saying how it couldn’t be them two legs
Cause y’all came from two legs
And y’all mamas would’ve loved y’all if they could’ve breathed
But they wasn’t ready for the deep
So deep, so, so deep, ayy
Y’all remember when the first blast came
And the beat fell off and the dreams got woke
And the light bent bad and the fishes belly up
And them coral castles crumbled ’cause they wasn’t quite enough
And conversation used to break like the floor quake
Like the bleached bones and the fin friends fled from they home
But the blasts wouldn’t stop ’cause they wanted black gold
And them no-gills had to feel it ’cause they couldn’t be told

[Chorus: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember
Y’all remember

[Interlude 2]
Ocean salinity: 35 PSU. Water pH: 7.91

[Verse 3: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember when the regime changed
That no pleas, no calm seas, let the water rise
So deep, so, so deep
Oil slick upon the sleeper was an awful thing to realize
If the two legs wanna wake the dead
They gon’ have to bring more fire, y’all is closer to the earth
So deep and y’all was talking how to get up in they heads
And got to bein’ real inspired circumstances of the birth
Has got y’all feeling like an army, better yet a navy
And Dagon gave y’all the blessing now y’all going crazy
They live with green up on the surface but they ain’t deep
That pistol shrimp could knock a two-leg off his feet
Y’all perfecting the steam void to rip up they ships
They using sonar as second language, y’all fluent with it
And all the dreamers is woke now, when nightmares swim
But everybody heard that “bloop” know y’all coming for them

[Chorus: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember
Y’all remember

[Interlude 3]
Surface water temperature: 308 Kelvin

[Verse 4: Daveed Diggs]
Y’all remember when the call went out, ayy
No deep, no more deep, sunshine
Y’all remember when the call went out, ayy
No deep, no more deep, sunshine
Y’all remember feeling wind up on your skin
No deep, no more deep, sunshine
Y’all remember how it burned in the beginning
No deep, ride on ’em, ride on ’em, ride on ’em
Y’all remember seeing sun across the surface
On the day that y’all first came up out the water, so, so deep
How the breaking of the surface showed the sky without a border
And the air was so much hotter, so, so deep
How the woke dreamer screamed and it rose tides
And the waves stretched up like a mountain high
And the no-gills gasped and they closed eyes
And they prayed to they gods and they asked why
And then y’all cried too ’cause y’all recognized Mama
In the faces of the ones that y’all would terrorize
They were sisters and brothers
They were the babies born up out the water
Not connected to each other
Not in knowledge of the one drop
But they had to learn today
Y’all had one shot, let the sun burn today
Let them feel the dark even deeper today
Make a two-leg a believer today
Let them know that they done woke a sleeper from a sleep
So deep
That y’all been dancin’ without any feet, so, so deep
Here’s the nerve that they struck with a blast
That they broke with a drill, that they burnt with the gas
Y’all remember, so deep, sunshine, ride on ’em
Y’all remember, so deep, sunshine, ride on ’em
Y’all remember, so deep, sunshine, ride on ’em
Y’all remember when y’all had to let ’em breathe
Ride on ’em, ayy

[Outro]
Initiating tidal wave sequence Uniform Romeo 0-3-0