Hate It or Love It

The following is an excerpt of a 17 February 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

As much as I love how cerebral the project is, I still think the main entree for most people is going to be how amazing your songs are.

I love "Tokyo Nights." I think it illustrates your ideas about the personal leading to the universal. Somehow I feel like a Japanese girl took me to go see a shrine, so somehow in my past there is something that resonates with some version of Tokyo that is not Tokyo, some version of the strange girl who is probably not Japanese, and some version of a shrine that wasn't a shrine.

Art:

I'm glad you like it. My theory is that we like specifics because our own lives have specifics--not even specifics that are necessarily similar! A great example of this that comes to mind is "Hate It Or Love It" by 50 Cent and The Game. Please listen to this song! 

I'm from Compton, wear the wrong colors, be cautious
One phone call'll have your body dumped in Marcy 

Before Rap Genius, I didn't know where Marcy was, but it didn't matter. 50 Cent and The Game pile up the specifics in this song and you would think they were running the risk of creating a very narrow in-group for whom this song makes sense.

Paradoxically, the opposite happens: it was an international hit in 2000 and one of my favorite rap songs of all time. 

What an amazing first line: "Coming up I was confused, my momma kissing a girl." Thank you, 50 Cent! 

Never experienced that. But I have experienced things that are similarly particular, specific, painful memories--experiences that have separated me from my fellows, left me desolate and alone. 

These memories do not fit into a metaphor of a broken-winged bird, like Mr. Mister. I vibe much more 50 Cent and The Game way more than Mr. Mister, with whom I probably have a lot more in common. 

This phenomenon is counterintuitive and paradoxical. It shouldn't happen this way. Particulars should exclude, not include. Perhaps it's witnessing someone who has had their mundane, incoherent experiences transfigured in art. Perhaps it gives us hope that we can experience a similar transfiguration in our own life. 

Something that embraces us in all our contradictions and incoherence, that doesn't require us to "burn away" the human, that doesn't hold us up to that Manichean standard.