When I try to explain my bocce-related work the desired effect—understanding—is not achieved. The first inhibitor is whether my audience knows the sport of bocce. A bit of explanation usually solves this—one might recognize it from seeing it played in a park, one might have played shuffleboard and thus analogously understands it, etc.—but this is a red herring, the work is not about bocce. It is about nothing, really, that bullshit paradox in which it intends to be about everything—vaguely describing friendship as communion, travel as pilgrimage, openness, awareness as prayer, positivity as faith, something basic as something universal, or at least kind of important. This perhaps is comprehensible, though it seems too much, needlessly pretentious, or, more simply, needless. It is a travelogue, it sounds like, is this not the genre?
But no, I am explaining in my head at this point, because I have lost them, I am back in my—apparently—inexplicable thoughts, unable to convey them, enjoying the fluid uncertainty, content in that, yet sure I could write it sometime soon. it is a new genre, I think, or it has no genre. I don’t want to manipulate anything. I don’t want a genre to manipulate the truth of my story. I don’t want to bend the world to my own conception of it. I don’t want to invent. Above all else I don’t want to fictionalize. I only want to recreate what I experience in a way true to the way that I experience it. Any experiment I want to attempt in the text I must first visualize in my life. However dull this may all sound, it is only as dull as the life I lead. Of course it all seems more interesting at the time except it takes much longer to get to the point and it can be even duller.
Of course all details mean, and most mean more than one thing, one must admit, if not already agreeing that every detail points inexhaustibly if not infinitely. This author feels confident in the choice to spend a writing career explicating or complicating the meaning of details that already exist in this world or, better, the perceptions that create those details, as opposed to creating details. I already interact with too much already with the ensuing insights floating on top of and around them. Perhaps that sounds lazy. Perhaps fiction allows us a necessary respite from reality, and should avoid it in order to do so. Perhaps fictions parallel to reality are needed to establish the literary disconnects between writer and story, story and audience, perception and reality, hand and—. Perhaps a life that is written as its lived never becomes a book or a life, just a back and forth rearrangement of signifiers, a game of Jenga that its players are convinced will defy gravity and never end, or a game where you throw objects in one direction and contemplate the composition before throwing them back the other direction and doing the same, and doing the same and doing the same. And doing the same.
But how does one describe a book whose entire content is its description? The formerly interested party has left and the thing spins in circles in the mind, the play with reality and the document of the experiment. All convention is thrown out—is that even possible?—for it oozes with the sap of mediocrity. Storylines feel contrived, characters reused and redundant, but what’s true will always feel true, and truth requires no convention. The world has become too deranged, absurd and manifold for one to tinker with the mere creation of a story. There’s too much on my heart right now. There’s too much at work in the stories that surround us already to continue the perpetuation and reuse of stale tropes, plots and metaphors, lest we become as trite and obvious as the media we consume. The institutions and systems we’ve devised have replaced our personal, human agency with arbitrary and banal patterns. We have come to see the world through tv and the world has become tv shaped. Stuffing a reality-shaped peg into a tv-shaped hole. There’s too much and at a certain point relying on the same recycled fictions is pure distraction, escape.
And so I assemble a collection of examples, creators that evaporate the frame and create the ouvre on all sides of “cut” and “action,” writing only before and after the fingers hit the keyboard, within and without the idiot box, or maybe, I think, the frame exists but is stretched to include everything. I write essays on Robert Kelly’s self-referential construction of R. Kelly, I write a book on the ontological game of peekaboo between Seinfeld the man and Seinfeld the sitcom, I admire excessively the work of Steve Coogan, feel alone in appreciating John Barth, I became manic with excitement upon seeing Joaquin Phoenix in I’m Still Here, I stop reading fiction and instead read only essays, preferring those with a narrator very present in the narrative, I listen obsessively to the College Dropout, convinced Kanye West has eliminated the line between living and making art. To become this person, who does this thing, all you have to do is do the thing that defines the person you want to be. But you already do this thing, you already are this person, this is you and this is what you do—what you want is a life that looks more like someone else’s, preferably with Benjamins fluttering in the air. A rapper is someone very different from someone who raps, it is not nearly that simple. Shawn Carter describes it very eloquently. Well, Jay-Z. I guess it’s not real clear if this is the voice of the man or the myth:
Rappers refer to themselves a lot. What the rapper is doing is creating a character that, if you’re lucky, you find out about more and more from song to song. The rapper’s character is essentially a conceit, a first-person literary creation. The core of that character has to match the core of the rapper himself. But then that core gets amplified by the rapper’s creativity and imagination. You can be anybody in the booth. It’s like wearing a mask. It’s an amazing freedom but also a temptation. The temptation is to go too far, to pretend the mask is real and to try to convince people that you’re something you’re not. The best rappers use their imaginations to take their own core stories and emotions and feed them to characters who can be even more dramatic or epic or provocative. And whether it’s in a movie or a television show or whatever, the best characters get inside of us. We care about them. We love them or hate them. And we start to see ourselves in them—in a crazy way, become them.
The Lacanian refraction of desire that I earlier alluded to is explicated beautifully here by Jay-Z. You want to be a larger-than-life performer like the rappers who have come before so you simply become a larger-than-life performer. And your audience can thus, through you, “in a crazy way,” become this larger than life character, which you are only able to be because the audience believes in it and desires it, in the same way your idols only became larger than life because you believed in them. Joaquin Phoenix, however, complicated this because he didn’t really want to be a rapper—it was all a put on. He wanted to perform the performance, he created a larger-than-life performer, “a mask” (ratty long hair in his face, beard, broken sunglasses, perpetually lit cigarette). It was the joke that celebrities, once they become famous, don’t actually do work, they just polish the statue. A rapper just wakes up, smokes a blunt, walks into a room where the track is running and describes the morning that just happened, maybe the night before, too, drops the microphone and continues to exist as P Diddy, so to speak. The difference between this conception and the truth is what makes both JP and Kanye so captivating. We never are who we want to be, because we never are a single fixed thing, being is changing, wanting to be classic and relevant, fixed at the top of the game yet active, evolving, (unpunctuated)
Kanye’s story, however, is so resonant because he was a rapper, he had lots to say, a character in the making—but nobody believed him, so he stayed a producer. “That’s great, Kanye, but, please, just produce us another solid gold track over which we may describe how great we are and the breadth and quality of our harem, etc.” But then he got into a car accident, had his jaw wired shut and “started to approach time in a different way,” as he explained in an interview with Steve McQueen.
Before I was more willing to give my time to people and things that I wasn't as interested in because somehow I allowed myself to be brainwashed into being forced to work with other people or on other projects that I had no interest in. So simply, the accident gave me the opportunity to do what I really wanted to do. I was a music producer, and everyone was telling me that I had no business becoming a rapper, so it gave me the opportunity to tell everyone, "Hey, I need some time to recover." But during that recovery period, I just spent all my time honing my craft and making The College Dropout. Without that period, there would have been so many phone calls and so many people putting pressure on me from every direction—so many people I somehow owed something to—and I would have never had the time to do what I wanted to.
An introductory panel to the video of his first single, “Through the Wire,” gives the context of Kanye’s new lease on life: “Last October grammy nominated producer KANYE WEST was in a nearly fatal car accident. His jaw was fractured in three places. Two weeks later he recorded this song with his jaw wired shut...so the world could feel his pain!” And then the video and the song start and we hear someone who sounds like Kanye after eating a scoop of peanut butter proclaim, “they can’t stop me from rapping, I spit it through the wire.” This sounds like some kind of figure of speech. Not the last-minute urgency of “Down to the Wire” or “Under the Wire.” He has all the time, a second chance, but he doesn’t want to waste a minute of it on someone else’s desire, “chasing y’all’s dream and what you got planned.” “Through the Wire” is the new idiom, when you realize that now is the only time that you can fulfill your aspirations, that not doing it nearly killed you, that everything you do that isn’t it is killing you. “So I won’t be taking no days off til my spaceship takes off,” as phrased in another song on the album. But it’s not a figure of speech: he is literally laying down his track with his mouth wired shut, the utterances pass through the wire. The moment he’s “gladly risk[ing] it all” and doing it, is physically the most difficult moment for him to be doing it. Yet here it is, this is his origin story:
But I’m a champion, so I turned tragedy to triumph
make music that’s fire, spit my soul through the wire
The context of the song is its story, so the actual content of the song is commentary on what it means, but that’s as confused in meaning as his actual ability to speak becomes compromised: “I really apologize for everything right now, if it’s unclear at all / they got my jaw wired shut for like, I dunno, the doctor said like six weeks.” His ambition was always greater than his talent, his genius beyond his capacities, or at least beyond the genre he was hoping to participate in. It becomes stripped down, minimalist, so ultimately honest that its entire subject matter is, simply, itself. He looks at the situation like a literary critic and breaks down his trope, the relationship between disfigurement and fame, pain and its voicing—and so he is Emmitt Till, cut down in his prime and Michael Jackson when the Pepsi-sponsored pyrotechnics burned his face and he is Mr. Glass, the duplicitous superhero of Unbreakable, and he is everything in between, including, most importantly, himself. And thus is born Yeezy, a superhero of hype, flying through levels of signifiers, masks and metacommentary, a persona whose design is “to go too far,” as Jay-Z put it, “to pretend the mask is real and to try to convince people that [he’s] something [he’s] not,” just to see if they’ll buy it, and they do, they always do. There’s nothing more American than hyperbole. And George Bush doesn’t care about black people.
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