I frequent this stanza in the same way I often skip to a particular part of a song. I recently re-discovered Californian beatmaker Jinsang’s ‘flow on,’ which contains an outro I find endlessly satisfying. The song turns over at 3.03, where for the remaining forty seconds, everything slows down into sensuality. This modulation in ‘flow on’ is reminiscent of the above stanza, which slows and slows. The outro of ‘flow on’ also does exactly what this stanza expresses: the song decelerates into a ‘tempo of interiority,’ which might also be understood as the speed of introspection.
Hua Hsu, in his review of Moses Sumney’s new album grae, writes that for millennia, thinkers in many disciplinary fields have tried to understand what it is about music that stirs such profound emotional attachment. He doesn’t claim to have an answer to this, but suggests that American psychologist Carroll Pratt might have come close when she purports that ‘music sounds the way emotions feel.’ If music moves us because of its ability to sonically reflect the depth and complexity of our own emotion, then poetry – a genre of verbal plasticity – might give such feeling shape and material, making it manifest.
We can also think of this another way. Langford writes that ‘poetry has built an aesthetic around exploring the unknown’ (125). If music does this by accentuating the phenomenon of consciousness, then poetry helps us describe this phenomenon. Maybe this twinship between what music affords us to feel, and what poetry affords us to imagine vis-à-vis this feeling, is what Langford gestures to in recalling T S Eliot, who ‘said that poetry was language which approached the condition of music. But it could equally be said that music – a great deal of it at least – is sound which approaches the condition of language’ (130).
Vuong’s omission of what exactly the man in the shower is singing might imply that it’s unknown to him, or it might mean that it isn’t important. The interpretation that I like the most, though, is that the man wasn’t singing anything. He was just singing. Singing for the sake of singing, because it feels good in the body, because it’s human to sing. If you’ve ever witnessed someone sing for their own pleasure, without knowing that you’re listening, or that you’re there at all, you’ll appreciate the tenderness of Vuong’s scene. Music, when it’s not playing as a result of our own curation, leads us to envision something outside of ourselves. It feels like peeping into someone else’s emotional arena; Vuong watching through the keyhole in ‘Threshold’ represents this.
I remember once finding my dad curled up asleep in the early evening with his phone next to him quietly playing a Bob Dylan song. I couldn’t help feeling that I had intruded on something private, but it was also such a warm scene to stumble upon. I’m always moved noticing the perfectly ordinary but intimate ways in which people find solace in music.
For Langford, ‘the weight of the body’ is a quintessential component of what makes music emotional. He elaborates on this by referring to jazz and rock music, which he positions at two ends of a spectrum. In ‘Minums,’ he speculates that in jazz, emotion is mainly produced through the spontaneity of organic musicality – while rock’s emotional power lies in its personal and cultural storytelling:
Perhaps jazz blows happiness so well because the body makes no claims and has no memory: whereas rock – which begins in the world – must measure itself against statements of hope and desire (73)
He distinguishes between music that is separated from language and music dominated by lyrical narrative. His image of a body that ‘blows happiness’ suggests that melody and rhythm alone can hold such deep emotion. In a sense, he is suggesting that enduring human emotion lives within music that comes from the body, and this is why a lot of music evokes a shared sentience. He’s implying that there’s something in music inherent to feeling that transcends the need for language to understand it.
Langford says the following about the formal affinities and differences between poetry and music:
When music and language occur together, the music rules the space in which the words are perceived … it will never, however, leave so much room that there is space for language to be tensioned against itself, as in a poem: that requires silence. If the lyrics look flat on the page, that is because they are waiting to be brought to life by the music – as opposed to the poem, which must have the muscularity to sustain an independent existence. (137)
He doesn’t explore genres like hip-hop in Eardrum, but I refer to this particular quote because I think it speaks to how the lyrics within hip-hop, as in any genre, are one part of a whole. As Hanif Abdurraqib says: ‘The voice itself isn’t the instrument. Language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier’ (‘On Breakups’ par. 2). Abdurraqib’s poetry, especially in The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, uses 90s hip-hop to soundtrack his youth, to offer cultural context, and to sculpt his memory and identity. The use of music in this way has a history – many poets refer to musicians and songs to evoke cultural and personal memory, but also to establish mood, time and place.
