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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
A SADNESS FOR THINGS
Calvin Scott
1971
Available on : The Complete Stax-Volt Soul Singles, Vol. 2: 1968-1971
Stax : 1993
[Buy It]
WHAT A SAD FEELING
Betty Harris
1965
Available on : Soul Perfection Plus
Westside UK : 1998
[Buy It]
SAD OLD WORLD
Frank Black
Fast Man Raider Man
Back Porch : 2006
[Buy It]
I CAN'T GO TO SLEEP
Wu-Tang Clan
The W
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
WAVES OF FEAR
Lou Reed
The Blue Mask
RCA : 1982
[Buy It]
When I was in college, I had a habit of walking out of parties minutes after walking into them. The reason was simple: I didn't like the sadness. I'd come into the room, and it was like I was walking into a sliding glass door of shame, embarrassment, and self-hatred--and not just my own. I'm not saying people didn't have fun at parties. People had fun. But the fun was created, to some degree, by the sadness. It was the negative space carved out of the unfun. I didn't like it, and when it started creeping up my spine, I left. Later on I learned some strategies for blocking out the sadness I was absorbing from the room, most of which involved poor eye contact and a steady stream of jokes. We do what we can with the tools we have.
Recently, I was taking a trip, and at some point along the way I sat in O'Hare in Chicago and watched the people pass by, their brows furrowed with one worry or another--maybe the mortgage was late or the insurance on the second car was too expensive or the husband was putting on weight in a way that seemed to indicate depression or the stepson was developing violent tendencies or the boss wasn't showing enough respect or the lover wasn't loving back the way she used to or the mother needed surgery. Every expression, every gesture, seemed to broadcast sadness. I put my headphones in to block it all out and went to get something to eat. In one of the restaurants, I got a sandwich, and while I was sitting there and eating it, I saw a woman sitting by herself, also eating. It was an airport. People eat alone all the time. There was no reason to make too much of it. And yet, the more I watched her, the more I was sure that she was sad, and not sad in a transitional or instrumental way, but deeply, foundationally, irreversibly sad. She was in her mid-thirties, attractive but tired-looking, reading a business report filled with black-and-white charts. At one point, she took out her cell phone, started to make a call, and thought better of it. The hand holding the phone sunk down until it was in her lap. I had taken my headphones out. I put them back in.
A few days after that, I was talking to a friend, and I mentioned this woman, and my other friend got angry at me. My problem, she said, wasn't that I was assuming that these other people's lives were sad--she agreed that they were, for the most part--but that I thought somehow that my life was better than theirs. "Well," I said. I didn't know what I was going to say after that. Luckily, she went on. She said that the reason I felt conflicted was that my feelings took the form of pity (which felt presumptuous to me) rather than straightforward sadness. If I allowed myself to simply feel sad for people, it might lead to sympathy rather than some dumb combination of pain and superiority. We were all in the same boat, so we might as well acknowledge our powerlessness before that fact. "Well," I said again. She had to go, she said. She went.
I thought about what she had said, and it seemed true for a few minutes. Most of what she says does, as a result of her incredible smartness. But then parts of it started to shimmer, like a mirage, and I wasn't as certain anymore. The part about connecting to the common humanity in us all had a certain appeal, but the part about doing away with the dumb mix of pain and superiority bothered me. Isn't that what much artwork is about? You feel the pain, it starts to drive you to your knees, you bring yourself back up (thanks to a narcissistic impulse), you move forward on this cushion of temporary superiority and use the energy generated by this process to create something. In fact, after a few times, you come to value the sadness, to receive it with a kind of joy, because you know that it will, in time, bring you to creative work.
Songs about sadness, of course, are highly common. There's the sad-eyed lady and the sad mood, there's fa-fa-fa-fa-fa, there's "Sadly Beautiful" and "To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)." But songs about the fact that the world is sad are rarer. Calvin Scott, a blind pianist and singer, was born in 1938 in Alabama and performed in a duo with the also-blind Clarence Carter before splitting up in 1966. (How they split up is noteworthy: the band was coming home from a performance and got into a car wreck. Scott was badly injured and then had a legal feud with Carter as a result of the medical bills.) Carter, of course, went on to have huge hits with "Slip Away" and "Strokin'"; Scott became a minor soul performer for Atlantic and then Stax who released a few singles and an album called "I'm Not Blind, I Just Can't See." This song, the leadoff track, moves through an almost comically inclusive litany of sad things ("Intelligent parents that are sometimes completely confused...Street dogs and lost kittens and people that cry"). Betty Harris, a New Orleans soul singer best known for her cover of Solomon Burke's "Cry to Me," covers some of the same ground--in fact, both she and Scott use dining alone as an archetypal scene of sadness. Maybe they were at O'Hare, too. (Harris also employs one of my favorite soul-music tricks: singing about loneliness while a trio of backup singers echoes the sentiment.) The Frank Black song has a more minimalist sensibility but also explains how we're wounded by busted love and illness:I know something about sickness
I know something about that now
There's nothing you can do except witness
No there's nothing you can do
And when the petals on the flower start to curl
Well you better hang on, now,
You better hang on
'cause its a sad old world
'cause its a sad old world
'cause its a sad old world
Don't try to tell me it's gonna be alright Of course, all this poetry can obscure the fact that sometimes it's impossible to process the world's pain into beautiful sadness. Sometimes, existence leaves you raw, at which point sadness (for others) turns to fear (for yourself and your survival), which in turn leads to rage and self-loathing and self-medication and sleeplessness and Ghostface and Lou Reed.Labels: ben, hip-hop, soul
posted by Ben
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