crying (over---or at least for---you)

Music: Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow (2011)

Hey girl.

I know you came here looking for my musical love---and a shared hatred for the commodification of human emotion.

But frankly, girl, I'm just not feeling it. I am feeling love for you, and certainly a profound distaste for cardboard hearts. But I somehow couldn't muster the energy to sit for hours in front of my mixing deck this year, as I have in years past. It's as if I didn't want to feel for such an extended period of time this weekend, with that familiar, enveloped intimacy of headphones. Next year, I'm sure I'll have endurance (and, with luck, the inspiration).

I reference my aversion to enveloped intimacy with the admission that music is central to my life---it's constantly on at my house---and because of its remarkable ability to evoke affect. I watched the Grammys on Sunday, and the power of music to do this to us was celebrated, first of course with a number of tributes to the late (and tragic) Whitney Houston, and second with the deservedly lauded song-craft of Adele, whose album 21 swept no less than six awards. Although the song "Rolling in the Deep" was featured, just about everyone I know really falls apart with this song:

If one hasn't already been deadened by the compulsion to repeat "Someone Like You" on the radio or television incessantly (good songs are frequently ruined this way), the tune is remarkably moving---so much so Saturday Night Live lampooned its power to induce throat-lumps in a skit:

The humor of the skit doesn't simply trade off of the song, but our compulsiveness to feel and the enjoyment of yearning, the way music is a catalyst for what Jacques Lacan termed jouissance. I think Adele's song and the skit says something interesting about Valentine's Day: the embarrassment of wanting to feel and using something artificial---something contrived---to get there. We love to deride this commercial holiday because we enjoy feeling whatever it is "Someone Like You" seems to inspire, but are embarrassed or register some kind of guilt for the fact that artifice can get us there, that something "artificial" can get us off.

The NPR show All Things Considered broadcast an intriguing story yesterday about the ability of music to inspire deep feelings. The spot featured music psychologist John Sloboda, who argued certain musical shifts he terms "appoggiatura" (Italian for "to lean"), a hard-to-define musical concept that refers to a sort of tension-release change-up in melodic structure. Sloboda isolates appoggiatura in the way in which Adele sings "you" in the chorus to "Someone Like You." "The music taps into this very primitive system that we have which identifies emotion on the basis of a violation of expectancy," Sloboda argues. "It's like a little upset which then gets resolved or made better in the chord that follows." The argument here, however, is familiar to rhetoricians as the (dis)pleasure of form, which Kenneth Burke defined as the creation and satisfaction of "appetites" in auditors; affect is heightened and the satisfaction is sweeter to the degree that satisfaction is frustrated. Appoggiatrua would appear to be, then, a musical theory of foreplay.

Sloboda describes our affective response to Adele's crooning as "primitive" and "hard-wired," however, Adele's co-writer Dan Wilson insists on the import of the song's lyrics, too: "With Adele, we wrote this song that was about a desperately heartbreaking end of a relationship, and she was really, really feeling it at the time, and we were imaginatively creating," Wilson says. "That walked her back through that experience. And when you and l listen to that song, we walk through her shoes through that heartbreaking experience — but it's in our imagination."

The NPR story thus foists our affective response to broken-heart ballads as a contest between the hard-wired brain and cultural fantasy, physiological response and narrative structure. Of course, the way music can deeply affect us is both of these---body and mind; the wedding of the two is why we cherish art so much. I think the music psychologist is on to something here by pointing to cognitive processes and essential features of the song's chord structure, timbre, and melody, however, I think Wilson captures the suasive appeal of the song in terms of a cultural fantasy we all know: the music evokes feeling, but also meaning, and that meaning is the imaginative scenario Adele paints in the song. Someone whom we loved---or didn't know we loved---has "moved on." On the side of meaning, Adele expresses the yearning registered in the loss, not simply of a lover, but of the possibility of sharing a life with someone.

No one, as the saying goes, wants to die alone. Sadly, although we don't like to admit it, we also know that all of us will.

"It's just a song." Right?

The song "Someone Like You" manages to yoke the body to meaning in the sign of "the cry," which was Freud's term for the "satisfaction" that results from a (dis)comforting experience of powerful tensions and releases. Crying can (and often does) spout from sheer exhaustion, acting as a release from some unbearable tension. But tension cuts both ways, or at least is experienced as physical and psychological. Freud would agree with Sloboda that the affect is "primitive," or more to the point, infantile: the cry of the infant registers simultaneously the abject need or necessity of the Other (initially, the mother, to battle pain, satiate hunger, and so on) at the same time as it does a recognition of an irrevocable separation. The cry, as such, registers a kind of impossibility and a need to be delivered from and to that impossibility. That "Someone Like You" makes us cry is apropos of what the song actually is, in essence: a cry for love. The embarrassment we might feel tearing up to the song is that crying with it is an admission of a certain dependency at the core of our being. And perhaps most importantly, that cry for love is not for a "masturbatory concession," the recognition of sexual desire, but something much more, shall we say, existential.

However cheaply the SNL skit delivers us from the cry to the laugh (from the tragedy of being to the comedic), the deeper truth of human affective response is still there: the skit ends with all of those moved deeply by the song expressing a mutual need for togetherness as a solution to "the cry." (This kind of mutual recognition, by the way, is the "fellowship" Freemasonry and related fraternal organizations is self-consciously built upon.) It is, alas, a temporary solution or substitute satisfaction; full price buffalo wings may be the best we can hope for. Such is the disappointment of a commercial holiday that skirts above the surface ruptures of abjection, as well as our cynical enjoyment of celebrating or deriding its contrived exotica.

"What's the whole point?" a friend exclaimed last week, only half in jest. "Am I supposed to fuck you more special or something? Such a silly holiday," she said. But I'm not so sure. I think the sexualization betokened by red hearts and flowers has nothing to do sexual pleasure, but rather a deeper frustration sexual "union" appears to represent, this "cry" that murmurs just below the surface. It is a cry that too many think can be stifled by plugging the hole. As Lacan puts it, "the big secret of psychoanalysis is that the sexual act does not exist."

I think that's the big secret of love, too. Some months ago I was talking with a different friend who remarked he would likely get back with his ex-partner, despite the fact they were not really attracted to one another in a sexual way. I had thought to remark, although I did hold my tongue, that love is not reducible to genital pleasure---that it's not reducible, period. Crying together is what it's about, not plumbing the depths of another's soul or interrogating their being for that secret something that makes the world shine in a different way.

Full price buffalo wings.

The same friend who lamented that she did not have a date for this evening and that the holiday was silly, nevertheless, gets it. She said she decided to have a special dinner with another date-less friend. Her dinner date said that "we each have a 'get-out-of-jail free' card for tonight. If either of us manages to snag a date with a boy," she reported, "we can cancel our dinner."

"That's more than I got," I said, smiling. "I'm poaching fish and buttering fennel and hanging out with the dog."

What I didn't say to my friend is that having a nice dinner with a best friend is precisely what celebrating this holiday should be about, and that a date with a boy would be much less fulfilling or enjoyable, in the end. Friendship. Everything else is coming up candy and roses, and too much of that eventually makes you sick.

One more, from our patron saint, for the road: