The Erudition of Texts

On any given weeknight, if you're driving Hwy 69 South past the brightly lit glass entrance of Snap Fitness, you can probably see me running on the treadmill watching The Family Guy on mute and, though you won't be able to tell from your car, I'll have my headphones in listening to Jay-Z. For almost two months now I've been concentrating on this Blueprint III record as if no other music exists. I'm a lot like my mom in that if I get a new CD I'll listen to it every day for about six months, and then on a whim purchase a new album. By the time I move on the the next one I'll know the lyrics to every song but will have forgotten the meaning. The songs have been set on AutoTune, a variation of elevator music for my brain in waking and in sleep. Or what's worse, I'll never have considered what some songs are telling me, why some of their lyrics cause a Rubik's cube of trouble for me that I spend lots of time trying to subconsciously ignore.

Thing is I listen to Jay-Z pretty much every day, and there are still some lyrics that I comprehend. What he's saying is clear--his articulation always is--but I don't get the meaning. Let me give you an example from the song "Run This Town" (featuring Rihanna):

"I'd get more in depth
If you boys really real enough
This is La Familia
I'll explain later
But for now let me
get back to this paper..."

So I've listened to this song about fifty times and I can tell you he never does explain the "La Familia" reference (or more accurately, why the La Familia reference needs explaining). The term represents the record label Jay-Z founded a few years ago, and all I know about it is Jay-Z is the only great artist signed to it. Is this a subtle reference to the creative freedom one has when working autonomously on one's own label? Like, because I'm with La Familia I have I can work at my own whim, and now I want to get back to this paper? Maybe I'm overanalyzing but I can say that I've listened to all this man's albums, and he is one of the few artists whose raps don't include arbitrary lyrics intended to fit some predetermined rhyme scheme that cause some analogies to be just nonsensical (I'm thinking now of Kanye: “The way Kathie Lee needed Regis, that’s the way I need Jesus.” Jay-Z means what he says. He's the best of all rappers because he's got sound and sense.

What's so funny is that even though I don't know what some of his lines mean, they are so beautiful and resonant to me that they become part of my lexicon. If I like the way something sounds but don't technically "get it," I'll find a way to make meaning. A few weeks ago when I visited New Orleans for my nephew Christian's birthday part, I spent every spare second I got updating Brock (my poor buggy, stuck in Tuscaloosa) through text. At one point when the little Hispanic kids and their poor obnoxious parents seemed to invade my mom's house all at once (and then proceeded to say and do things too appalling and intricate to describe within a text box, I sent Brock the line, "This is la familia, I'll explain later," which then carried over to him a double meaning. Yes, I was listening to Jay-Z on my four-mile runs while I was away, but there was a bigger point I was trying to encapsulate that moment: I'm with these unknown brown people, presumably new members of my family by way of my sister's criminal-no good-bastard boyfriend, these are my new people, but I can't talk about them now, Brock, so I'll explain later.

Still there are other lyrics that I can't possibly make my own, as they seem so bizarre and untouchable. For example, how do I account for these lines of Jay-Z's from "Empire State of Mind" (still my favorite song off the BP III):

"Me I gotta plug special and I got it made,
If Jesus paying LeBron, I’m paying Dwayne Wade..."

I'm assuming "plug special" is street slang, possibly drug-related, as the white-bred Google search yields no results. (Knowing Jay-Z as I do, I thought myself familiar with drug terminology, but if this is an example of it, then I'm not.) But it's the LeBron/Wade stuff that's really killing me. Jay-Z's referenced LeBron in songs before, called him his boy, his "young'n" (which I thought adorable). And this line clearly alludes to the NBA semifinals last year when Wade's Magic team kicked the Cavs' asses. Still, what is the line saying? That Jay-Z has become a turncoat because LeBron's team can't win? That Jesus is on LeBron's side (why? says who?), so therefore Jay-Z is on Wade's? But that interpretation doesn't make sense, because as far as I can tell Jay-Z's only weakness is that, like most other rappers, he's got a jones for Jesus.

One theory I've come up as to why so many texts confound me with is that any references to God or Jesus or religion just zoom right past my head. It's like I've got an invisible Jesus force-field around me: I don't get it, I don't want to hear it. Consciously this doesn't jibe with me, since I'm always telling myself I'm not an atheist, because atheists are closed-minded--I'm an agnostic because I can't figure out my own mind or it's place in the world (the supposition is I'm open to all possibilities--though it may actually mean I'm a coward).

That's the way I like to think of myself, but it's not the reality. I do think that Jesus people are freaks, thus I conflate any religious fervor with an inherent freakish nature. Therefore no Jesus people actually exist: only Jesus freaks ("out in the stree-eets, handin tickets out for Gaaa-wd..."). Rationale, Brooke-style.

This is problematic when considering my affinity for rap in general. God is everywhere, and god forbid a rap artist win some award, because he'll hear his name called again and again just before the litany of producers and assistants and record moguls. Oh God, you hang with a glorious crew.

The erudition of texts in my life extends far beyond rap lyrics, of course, and it doesn't always deal with my bafflement about God. Infinite times I have read a book or a poem and come across a line or phrase or passage that made me stop, go "Whoa," or "What," or usually, "Aw, hell." I'm stuck because I just don't get it. (If only life were like the movies, and I were the Tom Hanks character Josh Baskin from the movie Big, and when I said ad infinitum "I don't get it" at a business meeting in a roomful of my peers, they would marvel at my profundity, because yes, there are times when not getting it makes the most sense. If something is erudite bullshit and you call the erudite composer of the bullshit out on it, you're lauded as hero of all that is incomprehensible. But as I said, that's only in the movies. In life, it means you are stupid.)

I don't want to remain stuck in any text, ever, so I dog-ear the page or circle the line and move on. Problem is, I become engrossed in the narrative, or at least in the parts I do understand, so when I'm done with Bellow's Herzog (what a summer reading that was) or Paradise Lost or a Bly poem I think to myself, "Wow, that's enough thinking. Good work. On to the next one." And I'll become similarly eluded by a page (okay, pages) of Virginia Woolf or Proust or Marquez but trod on through because, in my mind, I'm always on to the next one.

This makes any current state of mind hard to live with.

As I'm typing this, I'm already on to the next blog. At this point in the semester I'm already knee-deep into the next. At my nephew's first birthday party as he smashed his hands in his cake, I saw him participating joyfully in kindergarten. I'm happiest right now with the person I haven't yet become.