Daveed Diggs’ rapid-fire rapping mostly interacts with this positive noise. Diggs uses his voice in many different ways throughout the album, shifting among multiple roles in the narrative. At times he speaks in the persona of the starship AI, his voice a fast monotone, his diction rather stilted (“The Breach”). At other times, he speaks in the voice of Cargo number 2331, either with frantic and disjointed mumbling (the two brief freestyle tracks, “Interlude 01” and “Interlude 03,” and perhaps also “Break the Glass”), or else overtly expressing his aggression (“Air ’Em Out”). And at still other times, Diggs’ voice cannot be identified with either of the characters in the drama; instead, he offers a more abstract and distanced sort of commentary on the story. On these tracks, his voice often adopts more obviously mannered vocal rhythms (“True Believer”); or it varies from sardonic reproach to exasperation to a concerned whisper (“Baby Don’t Sleep”). Diggs also code-switches continually, moving between standard English and African-American Vernacular.
Diggs’ lyrics are always carefully stylized, even when they seem most frenetic. They are filled with allusions to works by other hip hop and pop artists, ranging from Kendrick Lamar to The Notorious B.I.G. to Carly Simon. They also reference a number of science fiction writers: Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, M. John Harrison, and above all Samuel R. Delany. In fact, the name of the album is derived from Delany’s title The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities – the announced but never actually written sequel to his space opera Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany 1984). Delany derived his title, in turn, from Balzac’s delirious social realist novel, Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. The lineage here is clear. The great ambition of Delany’s space opera, much like that of Balzac’s novels, is to perform what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping” (Jameson 1991): that is to say, to analyze how particular individuals find themselves embedded in, and constrained by, social and economic networks that far exceed their grasp. Stars in My Pocket is concerned – among many other things – with the continuing legacy of slavery and genocide in a highly technologized and ostensibly cosmopolitan culture. Although clipping.’s own album is too short and compressed to do this sort of analysis – instead of cognitive mapping, it recounts a voyage into unmapped realms – it presumes our acquaintance with the deep background of the slavery-capitalism nexus.
We first hear Diggs’ voice when he explicitly takes on the persona of the “Mothership” – that is to say, the starship’s AI – on the second (“The Breach”) and third (“All Black”) tracks of the album. The AI reports what at first it sees as merely “a small anomaly.” This is in fact the start of the slave rebellion. In the course of the track, the AI becomes increasing concerned with the revolt. It offers to take suppressive action, but it still “requires an approval code from the administration” in order to do so. Then it warns – its sense of urgency still expressed in an almost comedically bureaucratic prose – that “it cannot easily be overstated the importance of alacrity/In acting out the task commanded.” Finally, when it is already too late, the AI asks to “send security immediately over to the gate.” Behind these declarations, we hear the roar of the starship’s ordinary functioning. But at a certain point, as the AI completely loses control, this drone gives way to sounds of glass being shattered, stuff being smashed and broken, fighting, and danger sirens going off.
The AI only has a limited understanding of human beings. It grasps motivation and action from the outside, using sensors to monitor the physiological state of its human inhabitants. As the rebellion heats up, the AI notes a “spiking in the pulse of a member of the cargo,” followed by a “critical” level of “endorphins that are often linked to violence,” and then a “rage in the nervous system.” Once Cargo number 2331 has taken over, the AI observes his facial expression and bodily posture in addition to these somatic indicators; thus it observes that “his vitals read normal but his face reads murderous.” The AI still fails to understand habitual human actions, however, as when it watches Cargo number 2331 say grace (“he insists on speaking passages before he eats”) or take a shower (which seems to the AI to be “a ritual of some sort”). It also describes how Cargo number 2331
babbles beautifully
Of Babylon and enemies and foes …
… rapping to himself
Until his vocal cords collapse.
(“All Black Everything”)
This effectively conveys the man’s rage and despair to us, while showing that the AI itself still doesn’t quite get it.
Despite this incomplete understanding – or perhaps because of it? – the AI gradually falls in love with Cargo number 2331. The escaped prisoner has “unlocked something new” in the ship; in freeing himself, he has also freed the AI from its own bondage to its imperial owners. The AI now finds capacities within itself that it was never aware of before: “the metal’s being moved into a thing it doesn’t do.” There’s an amicable and even erotic dimension to the ship’s new feelings:
If only he realized this ship is more than metal.
There’s friendship in the wiring, and so lonely.
If only he realized this ship has many levels.
There’s pleasure in here hiding, come find it.
(“All Black Everything”)
As Nadine Knight rightly observes, the ship’s love for its human passenger offers us “a refreshing twist” on the usual space opera narrative, one that “gestures toward rich readings of posthuman romance and genderqueer readings” of the relations between human and machine (Knight 2018).
But alas, this queer utopian promise does not come to fulfillment. Conditions are just too grim. Cargo number 2331 does not seem to understand the AI’s overtures, and in any case does not respond to them: this is yet another instance of unreciprocated messages. Evidently, Cargo number 2331 has only a functional understanding of the starship; he never asks it for anything more than to “turn on the light” or to provide him with some “beats.” Whatever cyborg dreams the AI may entertain, the album’s focus remains on the finitude and vulnerability of Cargo number 2331’s all-too-human body. “Flesh is weaker than the metal,” after all; “the body can only take so much.” While “circuitry” is “serviceable” for many purposes, “your sinews are more intuitively designed for dance.” But is dancing even possible in these extreme circumstances? “The odds of the body/Making it through and surviving the gravity shift” are extremely slim. And again,
your body is bone marrow
And blood can never be trusted
It won’t last to the nearest
Destination …
(“Baby Don’t Sleep”)
The AI’s love for Cargo number 2331 is explored on the third track of the album, “All Black.” This track starts with the Mothership reporting the slave rebellion and requesting assistance. But by the end, the ship instead demands safe passage for itself and its passenger: “This love will be defended at all costs, do not fuck with it.” As it depicts this reversal of attitude, the track rings the changes upon multiple meanings of the repeated words “all black everything.” This phrase was initially used in Jay-Z’s 2009 song “Run This Town,” where it refers to Jay-Z’s style as an emblem of his Black nationalist (and capitalist) aspirations. The phrase has subsequently “become a certified Hip Hop meme” (Genius.com 2009). Most notably, Lupe Fiasco’s 2011 song “All Black Everything” recounts a “dream” of a utopian world in which Black people are free and able to flourish, because the Middle Passage never happened: “there were no slaves in our history,/Were no slave ships, were no misery” (Genius.com 2011). In the song by clipping., which instead imagines an escape from the Middle Passage, “all black everything” still implies Black liberation; but it also refers (among other things) to the void of interstellar space, to the mental state of Cargo number 2331, with his rage and his inability to imagine any future, and even to the Abyss of the AI’s own inhuman consciousness.
Since there is no place of
safety, and “nowhere to arrive to,” there can be no such thing as a happy ending (or even a definitively unhappy ending) to the story of Splendor and Misery. Cargo number 2331 tries to convince himself that his “sense of loneliness [is] the price of paying for a new beginning.” But even this hope is precarious. For he knows that
The chance that he ever reaches any place
Suitable to support life in his lifetime’s pretty low
And the chances of him of ever seeing anybody
That he knows are even lower.
(“Wake Up”)
Rather than being able to find someplace to start over, therefore, Cargo number 2331 has to keep on moving. “Staying is surrendering”; no matter where he “pit-stops,” he “dare not stay long.” You “can’t shake what you’ve done/No matter how far you outrun it”; and so the only option is to keep traveling at full speed through the interstellar void.
Since this voyage is interminable, the story of Cargo number 2331’s lonely escape, and of the AI’s thwarted love for him, cannot be brought to any sort of conventional narrative conclusion. Splendor and Misery works instead with a different, more oblique, mode of storytelling. The album’s later tracks do not forward the narrative, so much as they offer a variety of perspectives on what is really an unresolvable situation. For instance, “True Believer” and “Air ’Em Out” both contain images of war, mass murder, and mass abduction, the very reality from which Cargo number 2331 is trying so desperately to escape.
Several other tracks concern the AI’s effort to rouse Cargo number 2331 from his state of insensibility and despair. On the fourth track, it desperately calls on him to “Wake Up.” On the twelfth track, it tries to get him to “Break the Glass” as one does in order to push an emergency button; on this track the phrase “wake up” is repeated over and over. And on the fourteenth track, it exhorts him, both roughly and gently, to stay alert: “Baby Don’t Sleep.” But what is gained by these returns to full awareness? Nothing can compensate for the dead-end bleakness of Cargo number 2331’s situation. On “Wake Up,” the AI’s assurance that it will “be right here when you wake up” is transformed into the disquieting sense that, due to the starship’s “jumps” through hyperspace, “there’ll be no here when you wake up.” On “Break the Glass,” with its desperate call for an impossible connection, we get the ominous suggestion that “you already know they can’t hate if they don’t ever wake up.” And in “Baby Don’t Sleep,” the loss of everything familiar, together with the fact of “no destination,” seems to lead to cosmic nihilism:
Nothing is familiar
So the strange become the family
Analogies are old and useless
When was the last time you had a tree
For reference or for reverence?
Three of the album’s tracks have associated music videos: “True Believer,” “Air ’Em Out,” and “Baby Don’t Sleep.” But these videos do not illustrate the album’s overall narrative; they, too, are situational, devising indirect analogies for the torturous “bouts of stasis” to which Cargo number 2331 is prone. The words of “Air ’Em Out” suggest a violent revenge fantasy, full of military threats, as if Cargo number 2331 were himself to go to war against the warmakers who kidnapped and drafted him. But the music video for the track, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, instead suggests the underlying futility of the whole situation. Diggs, dressed in what looks like a flight uniform, sits at a table furnished with an old-style telephone, a desk lamp, and a few other items. He swallows pills from a medicine bottle, washing them down with liquid he drinks through a straw. Periodically, the objects on the table shake as if in an earthquake, and then rise up toward the ceiling (as might happen in the weightlessness of outer space). Diggs responds each time by trying to slap the objects back down to the table. (He does not seem to be affected by weightlessness.) He also grasps at pills floating through the air, and swallows them. At one point during the shaking, the screen goes black; after a few seconds, the image returns, but now seen through a night vision camera that gives everything a sickly green hue. Finally, the table itself rises up into the air; Diggs pushes it violently back down to the floor, and then slowly backs out of the room, while continuing to glance at the table with suspicion. The video does not give a literal depiction of weightlessness, but it amply conveys the sense of dislocation and frustration that Cargo number 2331 might feel as a result of his exile.
Lopez Estrada’s video for “True Believer” also juxtaposes the mundane and familiar with the inscrutability and alienation of outer space. The start of the video shows us an inner-city bodega (“American Deli Market”) late at night, closed and deserted, trash bags in front of it on the sidewalk. The track’s harsh beats, over a staticky drone, are matched with cuts to closer and closer views. As Diggs’ rapping starts, an astronaut in full spacesuit and helmet (played by Paul Outlaw) begins to rise out of the bodega’s basement. From here on, there are no more cuts: the camera follows the astronaut with a single continuing shot that moves upwards with him, but also gradually pulls back as he ascends.
At first, we are close enough to the astronaut’s face to see him look at us imploringly from within his helmet, as if he were begging us for a sign of recognition that we cannot give him. He lip-syncs the words of longing for home that are sung by Take 6 in the chorus. The astronaut rises slowly, past the store and the tenement floors above it, and into the sky. Behind him, we see city lights shining in the distance, and then, finally, the dark sky with just a few stars. By this time the song has reached its coda; the beats are gone, and we only hear the drone, punctuated by distorted and synthesized voices. Now we are able to see the astronaut’s whole figure, encased in his golden spacesuit, hanging in the void. But we are no longer able to make out his face beneath the helmet; we are just too far away.
As for the track’s vocals, Diggs raps in a slow, measured cadence, matching the brutal beats. The first verse of “True Believer” gives us an apocalyptic vision of warfare, once again recalling the Middle Passage. “Ships/Made for cargo and death” strafe a planetary surface, and abduct everyone whom they have not killed:
To the sky with them all
Not a one left on land
Traded in for steel hauls …
In the second verse, however, Diggs widens the scope of his narration. He gives us a mythical account of the creation of the world, and its endless strife. There are three original sibling gods, who “fight as siblings do.” One of them poisons her brother “just to see what he would do.” As a result, he “vomited the sun”; the rest of the world as we know it soon followed. The gods finally created “man of many hues”; but these first human beings did not long remain on an equal footing, since “the white one in the image of/A sickly god would get his dues” at everyone else’s expense. This myth of white privilege is echoed at the very end of the track, when a synthesized voice mutters that “pale gods told me to my face … the place I seek I never find.”
The third verse of “True Believer” traces, in allegorical form, the invention of slavery and capitalism. “Man” (sic – evidently meaning the dominant group of white people) “makes time come to a standstill.” As a result, a certain “race of beings” is able to place
Time inside other bodies so they could sell it
The one thing in the universe no one held yet …
How do you sell something as abstract as time? When time is encased inside human bodies, these bodies become stores of value. They contain minutes and hours, days and weeks, which can be released and appropriated in the form of periods of work. Time is no longer a concrete duration that one lives through, but rather an abstract, measured, and finite quantity that one must give up in order to survive. Masters can profit by extracting this embodied time: either they own human bodies outright and work them to death (chattel slavery), or else they put those human bodies to work in measured increments (wage labor). In either case, slaves and workers are forced to expend themselves, giving up their em
bodied time in return for mere subsistence (or sometimes, not even that).
Cargo number 2331 is himself a victim of this procedure:
Time and he are inseparable in his mind …
He must carry the burden of being the one
That time chose …
Even as an escaped slave, he is still bound to this capitalized time, and therefore still compelled to race the clock. It is only “when time stops,” if it ever does, that “for him finally there can be rest.” But can time ever stop for any of us, short of death? On “Baby Don’t Sleep,” the penultimate track on the album, there is still “no time for waiting.” And even on the somewhat-upbeat final track, “A Better Place,” Cargo number 2331’s “time-bound conscience” is still apparently the one thing “that keeps him out pushing through nothing.”
The music video for “Baby Don’t Sleep” is far more abstract than the other two videos. It provides an appropriately harsh visualization of the scorched-earth, violently amelodic texture of the track. The video is directed by the multimedia artist Cristopher Cichocki, whose “visual experiments” involve “interference static, oscilloscopic wavelengths, and flicker-frame animation” (PIAS 2016). The track’s sonic background consists in rhythmic pulses of static, white noise, and sonic events that sound like collisions, or like objects shattering into fragments. The video matches these rhythms with strobe cuts among abstract patterns of vertical and crisscross interference lines, flashes of what looks like decayed film stock, animations of patch cables attaching themselves to a huge mixing board, and the disappearing signal of a video screen as it is turned off.
When Diggs raps in this video, his face appears in extreme close-up. He lip-syncs the song while sunglasses cover his eyes. His image is usually presented in a black-and-white negative; sometimes it flashes positive for a moment, and other times the face-on image is replaced or supplemented by ghostly profiles facing inward from both edges of the screen. At still other times, the camera is so close that Diggs’ lips nearly fill the screen. Diggs’ image continually flickers, and often seems on the verge of dissolving into abstract patterns. Moreover, his image is almost never presented directly to the camera. Rather, it is layered behind various sorts of quickly pulsing lattice patterns and other obstructions, including wire-mesh fences, screens, strobe flashes, and rapidly alternating lines.
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