I’m in thrall to chaud bonheur – hot happiness? – a phrase I just learned from Stanley Corngold (who uses it near the end of his post in this batch). The burn flashed me back to my twenties when I locked on promesse de bonheur from Stendhal’s passionate NO to Kant’s el blando Germanic aesthetic: “That is beautiful which pleases without interesting.” Oh, please, please, please…
The rag you’re reading has always hoped to cultivate instincts for happiness. (When I recall my crew’s gone good times in the 80s and 90s, it seems sadly apparent to me that First has served as a sort of substitute for all yesterday’s parties.) First’s fun had never been tuned to disengagement. In our time your editor has invoked C.L.R. James’ “struggle for happiness” and Arendt’s “public happiness.” You can trace the stages of First’s happiness in the About section of this website where there’s an archive of mission statements. What you’re reading here may end up there since I’ve found myself looking backward in this summer of our 25th year in the game.
It’s Playboi Carti’s “Sky” that’s put me in retrospective mode. Carti repurposes a melodic line from a hip hop track by Bone Thugs-n-Harmony that gave First of the Month its name. BT-n-H’s rap about welfare paydays aimed to speak to “poetic hustlers on the graveyard shift.” Our writers’ collective’s choice to take the name of our mag from a rap song got us some pushback from mandarins who took it as a sign First was into slumming. Those negos — the ones who can still stand on their criticism — might feel confirmed if they watched “Sky’s” video.
Per another Ben: “Carti and his goons rampage through a supermarket—rolling around on carts and ripping up aisles. The song itself is about Carti’s desire ‘get high ’til I can’t feel nothin’.’ A relationship with a woman—at first going well, then turning sour—is the second focus of the song. Along the way, Carti flexes a gun, money, luxury brands—cliche stuff. Ad libs are key in ‘Sky,’ as in every one of Carti’s songs: a series of calls and self-mocking responses, that range from ‘what?’ (more like whah, phonetically) to cult lingo like ‘slat.’ His ‘baby voice’—an imitation of a high-pitched infant that’s made him hit after hit—though, doesn’t feature.”
The vid’s anarcho-stupid moves are indefensible yet the wit behind the sound of “Sky” is undeniable. The key here is that “wha’,” which sounds like “woke.” Carti (with a little help from his producer – who’s named, aptly, “Art Dealer”) implicitly sets his will to get so high he could fall from the sky (and feel nothin’) against the claims of goodies. Carti is deeply, proudly politically incorrect. His CD, Die Lit, opens with this credo: “No cap and gown, didn’t go to class.” Yet Carti, self-aware vertical invader, mumbles around an opposition near the heart of the story of humankind, which is divided “brusquely between those who know the sky, and those who know only the earth.” Pace Amiri Baraka. (And excuse me like Jimi? Yup, Hendrix gets name-checked plenty by Carti. Another reason to be fearful.) Baraka, thankfully, got less brusque about the great divide as he grew older. He grasped that local people didn’t need to choose between Sky and Earth. Maybe he could’ve reached the blue-black boi from ATL, underscoring that numb highs are worse than dumb. On this score, Carti’s confessions in “Sky” are full of pathos: “don’t even like to hug (To hug, hug), I don’t even like to kiss (Slatt, slatt)…”
Yet anyone who simply disdains his current live performances of “Sky” et al. – featuring punk-metal guitar and pyrotechnics – should probably save some pity for themselves. No doubt Carti’s large cult has a high percentage of (sorry) white devils – jerk-offs with suburban life-chances and better odds than Carti who seems (permanently) on the verge of hip hop martyrdom. If he lives to tell, though, the intensity of the shows he presides over may be their own justification. I’m alive to the need for dance parties that get people into grooves that beat “stale techno-rave.” (To lift Charlie Keil’s phrase: See his poem here.) But in the meantime, in the absence of human-scale live musicking, Playboi Carti and his people are collaborating to make their own rites. This is how they do it…
While I’m too old for Carti’s spectacles, one of his tracks, “F33l Lik3 Dyin” (“if you’re not mine”) has teased me into an act of identification. That song has a back story. It’s in this charming video for an indie rock song by the band Bon Iver. I’m guessing Carti was moved by the modern dance of the black woman who gets her kicks on a “bright fall morning” imaged in the song’s chorus…
Carti’s “Dyin’” samples “iMi’s” chorus as it reconfigures Bon Iver’s melody and pumps up the 808s. Fall’s my favorite season too so all the brightness hits me where I live even as Carti’s darks – “feel like I’m dyin’ every day” — make me worry (as ever) for him. I sense a war within: sweet lessons in love and life – “My mama always knew I was a star…/Sacrifices every day, yeah…/She gave me the keys to her only car/I took that bitch and I went far…” – crashing into the chip-on-his-shoulder: “I can’t fall/back against the wall/still I stand tall/fuck all y’all…”
I never yearned to be a star, but I know something about chippy self-presentation. I think back on how I kept my back against the wall when I went to informal mid-80s seminars about popular culture at Columbia University, episodes I’ve been known to fold into First’s origin-story. I recall how two grad students – fated to be full muckety-mucks at Sarah Lawrence and Yale – advised me to rethink my own tendency to hang tight on the margins.[1] (Apparently, my way of being in a seminar was…borderline. As if I was on the edge of saying “Fuck all y’all”? Nah, I wasn’t rude.) Somehow, my body language conveyed that I wasn’t headed in any respectable academic direction.
Back then, I might’ve blamed my manners on the 60s. While I was only 12 in 68, the (sorry) promesse de bonheur in the music (and rumors of the civil right movement) came through to me. A note Michael Ventura wrote to himself as the 60s were fading out still speaks to/for me:
We know now that our dreams are not going to come true. Are never going to come true. We have learned that our dreams are important not because they come true, but because they take you places you would never have otherwise gone, and teach you what you never knew was there to learn.
I might be overestimating how much the 60s meant to me. What’s certain, though, is I’ve been lucky enough to keep happening on teachers who help me learn how clueless I still am. Some of them are elders like Stanley Corngold who’s lit up the phrase that got me going here, explaining how it “appears in a remarkable aperçu by André Gorz, Sartre’s amanuensis: ‘Do you know the chaud bonheur of learning that someone has suffered even more than you for the same great cause?’”
I sure do, even if I haven’t earned “suffered” or “great cause” (so take those down a few notches). I want to tell you, though, I got hots — and chills — earlier this month when I read C. Leigh McInnes’ “Yard Politics.” (Talk about going “places you would never have otherwise gone.”) I used to hate mowing the lawn. But McInnes shamed sheepish me into re-seeing a middle class chore as a soulful people’s virtue.
***
Fr. Frechette’s latest post came in as I was deadlining on this post. After learning how he’d lost his Haitian brother-from-another-mother who’d helped him stay in the struggle for decades – the idea of pondering First’s little history seemed petty. Trite on, Benj! Though maybe my look backward is still salvageable.
Last month (long story shortened), I steered a scholarly Man-of-the-Right who’d converted to Catholicism to Fr. Frechette’s work. This former colleague of John Eastman allowed he was drawn in by Fr. Frechette’s writing but confessed to a reflexive resistance:
…a certain caution sets in when I hear of a Catholic program directed to social change. The most important changes that the Church brings to the world is to change lives through evangelization and help get lives in order to make it to heaven.
I’ll allow that stern converso’s risk-aversion served to confirm my own sense that Fr. Frechette belongs in First. God knows, I’m humbled and chaud whenever he graces our pages.
Note
1 I was tighter with another seminarian, Eric Lott, who went on to his own brilliant academic career. Eric knew better than to try to straighten me out even as he put his shoulder to wheel when it was time to start First.