KENTUCKY MEAT SHOWER #14: MEETING EARL SWEATSHIRT AND DRAKEO THE RULER AT THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS
Rip Charles Portis--Meeting Earl Sweatshirt and Drakeo the Ruler at the Grand Hotel Abyss--Auto Focus--Be Warned!
Happy Monday. It’s time for another Kentucky Meat Shower.
Upon hearing of Charles Portis’s death, I stacked up every book of his (at the time about 40 percent of the collection, Norwood and Gringos) and vowed to track down the remaining three. True Grit is too easy to find: going into a used book store, going directly to the Ps and seeing True Grit feels like opening a pack of Pokemon cards and getting nothing but Zubats. The elusive two are The Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis, which it occurs to me in no small part deal with obscure books. Nonetheless, I tracked down Dog and have plans to buy a paperback copy of Masters as soon as I get close to the conclusion of Dog. I already know how it happens, but still.
It also occurs to me, the first of his novels, Norwood, about a peckerwood ex-Marine country singer who goes to New York to get seventy dollars from his pal, reflected my original end of the month plans. I had tickets to see Australian trio The Necks at Le Poisson Rouge. I’m older and maybe lumpier than Norwood Pratt but I imagine we have one thing in common.
It’s a town that fills me with some anxiety. I have lived in two places: Wise, Virginia, and Richmond, Virginia two places that you can’t call congested. One is hilly and the other is mostly flat, but the point remains. As Southern, though a different cut of the cloth than Norwood, New York makes us anxious because it’s what we think about when we think of “northerners”: rude, loud, unable to slow down, and condescending as all hell. Some of my best friends are northerners, might I add, and when I worked in call centers, New York business offices were straightforward without being rude. But what’s hard to understand in small towns is congestion is its own social order and requires new rules to be learned.
What you can’t ignore is the new craze sweeping the nation: our pandemic, the coronavirus. They’ve already shut down a couple of schools here and the NBA is postponing the season (putting my beloved Detroit Pistons out of their misery). My newish job awaits in the balance with my PTO ready to be spent if need be. You can imagine I wonder if a New York trip is worth it. I considered going up anyway, as you can imagine I don’t value myself very much and think being in the most populous city in America during the time of a pandemic might be interesting. Remember also that I sneezed once and thought “I could get a hell of an essay out of the coronavirus”, probably because the effect it has is the same as another malady I’ve written quite a bit about.
When I say effect, what I mean: coronavirus, in its insistence to limit human contact, in its paranoia and cessation of entertainments, resembles a mild depressive episode. Our scarier moments may resemble grief. This is not that, though something resembling magical thinking occurs with the fetishistic attachment to buying 2 months of toilet paper. When you’re depressed you look for any reason to get out of bed and when you do you move in a shuffle towards all your tasks. As society slows and we’re told to stay out of contact with each other, it’s like all the serotonin disappeared in one thunderclap. And, of course, we’ll still have to go to work, which tend to make both worse. They may prescribe mindfulness and hand sanitizer, but neither cure it.
Which puts it all in a bind: is it better to act under the threat of this depression called coronavirus or stay put? But I have to be responsible. Australian noisy improv will have to wait. The sequel to Norwood will not feature him, more tattoos than one goofy panther, sitting in an abandoned subway car with a face mask.
MEETING EARL SWEATSHIRT AND DRAKEO THE RULER AT THE GRAND HOTEL ABYSS
Welcome to rap, where snippets may be all you ever get and DJ joints get false names from unknown djs. But when Earl Sweatshirt decides to remix a Drakeo the Ruler and 03 Greedo joint, you take notice. Of course, there’s plenty of questions to ask.
What does rap’s most spiritually adrift snot-nose have to do with a cold devil and his pal, the howling wolf of Grape Street? In many ways it goes back to that beat: Final Fantasy keys chopped up and barely there drums sounding like something Tyler and his neptunes worshipping mileu might have cooked up at the turn of last decade. Remember that Tyler (and to an extent Odd Future’s) early nemesis Brandun Deshay helped Danny Brown cook together a Pimp C homage over the Chocobo Theme. But that was back before nobody knew the Ruler and Beatboy was sliding beats to a satanically intoxicated motormouth running with Odd Future and back when two of our three protagonists were running free. Now one, Drakeo the Ruler, is being retried for a crime it’s already been decided he didn’t commit. The other, 03 Greedo, will, if the state has anything to say with it, would have been in jail for 300 years. The state knocked it down to 20.
People remark on the fact rap got more open with its chemical excess, something that was always there, just under discussed. When Pimp C got arrested with a planted eightball he told the police, “If it was mine, it would be in a big ol’ Crown Royal bag.” And it was always there if you knew where to look: there’s even songs with Cash Money’s infamous impresario Birdman extolling the virtues of snorting heroin (“I Need a Bag of Dope”) way before he had the platinum football field and a lawsuit from his adoptive son Lil Wayne. The change is this: in every aspect of life, the chasm made itself known. You can call it the abyss, the void, or whatever, but there is a hole that can’t be filled and in its own attempts to fill itself it has begun to eat everyday life. It’s not as if it hasn’t been there, of course, and throughout the beginning of street rap trauma and depression were as ever present as Adidas or White Sox hats. But after the dashed hopes of the Obama years, everything is tense. The contradictions are rubbing against each other like San Andreas does the Pacific Plate.
Lukacs said of the Frankfurt School that, like Schopenhauer before them, the academics had taken up residence in “the Grand Hotel Abyss...a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered”. What he probably didn’t fully consider was this metaphor would be a great descriptor of 2020 (or Future’s music) and that deep in the chasm you could see all of our ills, and that the chasm, more than getting deeper, was eeking ever closer to the very foundation of the hotel. The Grand Hotel Abyss, really, is not like Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest, but more like Ballard’s High Rise: a fortress with white horses at the top and an underclass below, aware of what’s creeping towards them and staving themselves for the fall, when the infinite stories of the fortress crash down upon them.
Drugs are one way to stave. Earl’s chemical adventures were there from the start when he rapped in a salon chair through a fisheye lens about being off six different liquors with a Prince wig plastered on. Early in Earl’s career, if you listened close enough between the now juvenile serial killer shit and dizzying assonance, you could hear a sadness a little deeper than the emo hysterics on Tyler, the Creator’s Bastard and Goblin. On “Stapleton”, in the final verse, he rhymes the following:
product of popped rubbers and pops that did not love us
so when I leave home keep my heart in the top cupboard
so I will not stutter when I'm shoutin, “fuck you, son”
No amount of juvenile rape jokes, as gross and as they were, could really get away from the fact that this was a very sad, very smart kid who pretended to be a menace to get attention paid to his very real pain. Even as Earl got older he pointed this out: “I said that I say crazy shit in songs because I don't yell in real life.”
Later he’d bemoan his nightmares when he stepped away from weed and name a song after a bad batch of acid he took on Christmas Eve. But his music moved from a transitional record from his snotty old days (Doris) to his dark night of the soul (I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside) to a now more meditative approach, where the messiness of conduct inspires invention, and the messiness attendant. Of course, we can’t give credence to revanchist notions of hooliganism by making this a simple redemption tale. As bad as some of the content of those early records aged, remember what you were laughing at in 2010 and then think about the fact there’s an entire tradition in Appalachian music of songs about killing some poor tart for cheating on you that has been mined by alternative artists. Nobody goes around asking Steve Albini to apologize for Rapeman. The change in content is simple: Earl got older and his worries changed. Just like you don’t laugh at 4chan any more, he didn’t find turning himself into a baby Richard Ramirez served his needs. All apologies were natural and unforced, the product of one of the most virtuoustic young rappers, up there with baby Biggie and Lil’ Wayne, coming into his own.
When you’re so close to being devoured, refusal to grovel becomes a sort of courage. If you didn’t know the backstory, you wouldn’t think Drakeo the Ruler had anything going on, even if the title of his latest tape was Free Drakeo. But the chasm expands: beyond its spiritual implications, it must threaten to swallow up bodies. Maybe we can coin a word for this chasm that both exists as something to contemplate and something that grows as human misery does: garmonbozic, after the cream corn like substance the residents of the Black Lodge eat in Twin Peaks that is a transmuted version of pain and sorrow.
Drakeo the Ruler is currently in Los Angeles County jail, victim of a fairly bizarre charge he’s a criminal mastermind by throwing a whole series of trumped up charges at him. Supposedly he handed a member of his rap crew the Stinc Team to kill rapper RJ at a party RJ wasn’t even supposed to be at (RJ, for the record, doesn’t even think Drakeo wanted him dead). Instead, a Blood named Red Bull got shot from a red Mercedes. Drakeo’s was black. Meaning: the case is Drakeo is such a don of crime he managed to make an entirely separate red Mercedes appear, shoot at Red Bull without ever once considering that being at the scene would incriminate him, all in order to kill his long-time nemesis RJ, who, again, was never supposed to be at the party and who doesn’t even think he did it. When the chasm gives you such a ridiculous hand, to quote the man himself, fuck being humble. Fuck redemption arcs and narratives.
Instead: raw nerves, John Carpenter synths over rattling bass, a croak of a voice that sounds like too many cigarettes, and a presence like mercury. We talk about certain guitarists never wasting a note; Drakeo never wastes a decibel or a syllable. On occasion at the end of a song he’ll let off a “sheesh” (probably one of my all time favorite ad-libs) or a bizarre rant about how someone is so broke they must be from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Other than that: just an insistent, icy rapping. He called it “nervous music” for a reason. If you need to know why he’s nervous, I can’t tell you more than any of the reporting can, or remind you, again of that chasm.
The music may sound nervous, but Drakeo never does. I’ve wanted to write about “nervous” music for awhile. One morning, I listened to the original “Ion Rap Beef”. Those Final Fantasy synths sound like a preset played while the batteries on a keyboard die, and the bass rattles your car like dice in God’s hands. Drakeo only sneers “all mud in the freezer/n*****s saying I’m an addict/I’m dealing with some things you perceive as post-traumatic”, laughing at the idea he could be swallowed up. I ended up turning it off. The nervous music had done its job and was stronger than me. It spat in the face of piety, which is the advantage a disrespected art always has, and an advantage it only grows the less it wants to be invited to the country clubs, which will only get you laughed at by the people who run them be it in your face or behind closed doors. The place of insurgent art is to remind us what an insurgent artist once sang: don’t you mind people grinning in your face and grin back to the hollow smile of the earth.
AUTO FOCUS
One of the few resolutions I’ve kept up with this year is watching more movies. I’ve already seen 10 this year which is probably as many as I saw last year (or at least close to it). However, the month has felt a bit like a disappointment so far with only one movie blowing me away: Auto Focus, a biopic about Bob Crane’s descent into sex addiction. To go ahead and set myself up to get yelled at more, which I may very well be doing by the end of this mini-review, I believe it does what Mad Men’s Don Draper arc wanted to do in two hours what it took Matthew Weiner nearly ten years to do. The endings may be different, but I know which one I didn’t turn off, shouting “Okay, we get it, he’s a wreck.”
You can make a case, like pretty much all Schrader movies, there’s some reactionary cultural motives there. That being said, browsing Letterboxd, I did see a comment that kinda irked me a little. Lest I betray my own hang-ups, I need to give some context. My mom is implored to quit reading from this point forward.
The general layout of the movie is Bob Crane (Kinnear) gets the starring role on Hogan’s Heroes and meets a hi-fi guy named John Carpenter (Dafoe). Carpenter gets Crane to come with him to a strip club, things get worse from there. Along with the descent into sexual addiction, we watch the progression of technology: the more advanced technology does, so do the two’s sexual addiction.
As you can imagine this causes marital issues with Bob. Carpenter comes over. Bob is watching a sex tape he made. He notes he’s getting hot and whips it out. The two masturbate, no fervor, no enjoyment. Just a mechanical response.
I found an online review I won’t say where but, the gist of the interview was that, more or less that the mutual masturbation was kink-shaming. That’s a concept I suppose exists. However, here, it doesn’t apply at all, because I believe the sex in the film isn’t just the sex.
The obsessive viewing of pornography by Crane that Crane stars in has way more to do with the First and Second Commandment: thou shall have no Gods before me and thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. More than any sexual escapade, which the movie doesn’t give a dialectical opposite to and, by the way, is better for (here’s a healthy, fulfilled sexual relationship! Here’s how you do it right!) Bob’s sin is worship of the self. There’s a reason he chronicles his Leave it To Beaver home life and at the end in the bar he turns on Hogan’s Heroes other than his trolling for action. He is the graven image.To break that image and admit he has a problem, the thing that may save his career, he can only insist everybody should be like him.
But with that, the worship of technology as an implement to inflating the self. Every new gizmo has to be added and when Bob’s career leads to him doing dinner theatre, John Carpenter ends up meeting him at the airport with entire trunks of gear. At the end of the film, we see some figure pick up a camera tripod to brain Crane, and an electrical cord to wrap around his neck. Like Moses feeding unto the Israelites the melted down golden calf, the object of worship becomes an instrument of destruction. Or to quote Pee Wee’s Play House, if you love technology, why don’t you marry it?
Do I think Paul Schrader finds the sex in the film icky? Probably: he was raised Calvinist and all of his works go between the sleaze and the transcendent (witness the ass-grabbing make out that caps First Reformed). But watch, if you will, those two men jerking off again. They don’t even seem to be enjoying themselves. They worship the film of Bob having sex like former Catholics signing the cross out of habit. They’re doing it because they have to, not because they want to. Obligation is the death of passion.
BE FAIRLY WARNED
I’ve been trying to do two of these guys of a month, but I actually have the hot hand on a play I’ve wanted to write forever. You’ll see the next issue in early April. Until then, wash your hands and don’t take any wooden nickels.