“Hyperbole, Hyperbole! Or, What Blood Orange Can Teach Us About Accepting The Human Condition”

C. Martin Caver  2/1/14

I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech this year.  I didn’t even realize it was taking place until after it was over.  The implications of this oversight did not fully set in until several days later when I found myself in the shower listening to Blood Orange’s new album Cupid Deluxe for about the thousandth time in three days.  

I could say a lot about the effect this album had on me.  I could say, for instance, that its mellifluous beauty induces aesthetic reflections capable of carrying the listener to new planes of thought, new dimensions of existential awareness.  And yet I wax rather hyperbolically when a work of art really arrests me, so such encomiums may not be wise. I told a friend of mine after listening to Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, that it was a What’s Going On for a new, subaltern millenium.  Like that somewhat inflamed comparison to Marvin Gaye, I am tempted to compare Blood Orange to other avant-guarde (Prince, PM Dawn, and A Tribe Called Quest come to mind).  But what listening to Cupid Deluxe really does at a fundamental level is not musical at all.  Its real genius lies in the way it conjures haunting memories -- not just conventional memories (of other music, past events), but entire dispositions, outlooks, aspirations and anxieties from days gone by, submerged vestigial visions, carried along despite themselves.

The album takes me back to Nîmes, a town in southern France where I lived for a year after college, a decade ago now.  It reminds me of walking around that ancient town, which, towards the end of my sojourn, had become as familiar as it was foreign.  That feeling of familiarity and relative comfort, yet strangeness, mystery, and possibility characterized not only my time in Nîmes, but much of my early twenties, like a song that’s both terrific and seductive.  Cupid Deluxe is an album full of those songs, full of those memories.  What’s more, it brings them to you in a way that makes you realize that those feelings (of being untethered, caught between worlds, standing outside of normal time), they are never gone.  “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” said Faulkner.  “It keeps on running back.” continues Blood Orange.

That is what is so hauntingly, desperately good about this album.  It reminds us of the possible, the potential that is no more, and the futility of ever reckoning with it, the futility of ever thinking we could choose our fate in a way that was truly intentioned, willed with fully sovereign faculties.  What Dev Hynes, the genius behind Blood Orange, does time and again through the medium of the love song is show how our choices are always constrained, and yet the memories of contemplating and making choices are always bittersweet because they feel so free.  These feelings are destined to haunt us, because our choices, our projects, our lives, remain fundamentally contingent -- influenced and interpreted by others until and sometimes even after the very end.  In “Chosen,” a song that should be go down as the slow jam of the decade, we hear those moments of standing outside of time, the exquisite fecundity therein, and the lachrymose air we gasp at in ruminating on those moments, “Another day and I’ll lose, but I don’t want to choose...Time in your mind, make it right,”   Later, in “Clipped On,” this ambivalence of being outside of time yet constantly reckoning with the contingency we find there is summed up: “And I don’t know, if this is the edge of my seat or it’s the end of my rope.”

Back to the State of the Union, I didn’t watch it.  I’ve watched every one of them since probably the first Clinton administration and I didn’t watch it, nor did I really care much.  I was a die-hard Obama voter, who canvassed for him, phone banked for him, donated to him, and I watched HBO (Girls, True Detective, and Looking -- all stories of and for the self-absorbed) instead of listening to my president. Had I grown cynical? Jaded? Despairing? Had the fervor with which I supported him just simply subsided?  If I had watched would Obama have simply been singing “Always Let U Down” to me?  Or is what Blood Orange telling us, through the lens of love, that our actions always outrun us, are always constrained by others, lead to unexpected consequences, and that thinking we can overcome them will “always disappoint you … always let you down.”  Hope must not be hope for “getting it right this time” either in love or in life.  In “No Right Thing” Hynes sings “On your own and I’m on my own and we were wrong.  There’s no right thing.”  

Hope has to be tragicomic.  It has to be hope for the mere feeling of this inadequate, nonsovereign sort of freedom.  It has to be a longing for the mere feeling of this imperfect, discordant sort of love.  It has to be a hope that when it is all over our lives (and our loves) will somehow imply a story, a character in a story, one that makes sense.  And that the few who will remember us will interpret our series of constrained choices in ways that are generous, perhaps, if not flattering -- that have meaning, at least to them if not to us.  At least we hope.

The final song off Cupid Deluxe is “Time Will Tell.”  It easily feels like a eulogy for the deflated dreams of the millennial generation.  In it, the chorus picks back up a refrain from “No Right Thing.” It feels just like a memory, remembered.  Hynes sings, “Time will tell if you can figure this and work it out. No one’s waiting for you anyway, so don’t be stressed out. Even if it’s something that you’ve had your eye on. It is what it is.” We must accept that the way the world is simply means that our choices, our dreams, our loves, our lives, have been spun of threads we did not choose and interwoven in a fashion we could not fully control nor comprehend. Yet this capacity to try, to hope, to begin again despite the lack of sense, the lack of rules, is what makes us human, is what conditions us as such. We continue to love, to reach out to one another. We continue to tell stories, to pass judgments that make sense of these always-beginning jetties of action -- action that feels free, love that feels right. We must celebrate with near abandon when such stories, such loves, take a form as beautiful as Cupid Deluxe.