Complex Joy and the Function of Art
HOW BILLY WOODS, JACK GILBERT, AND OUR VERY BEST ARTISTS CAPTURE THE ORNATE MAELSTROM OF BEING HUMAN
Art by Madi Albanese
If you’ve ever talked to me about music or literature, you’ve heard me espouse the genius of billy woods. woods is an indie rapper who makes jarring, detail-oriented, layered music that spans generations and continents. He raps things like, “It’s too late for qualms with the hammer in the palm / You a slave to the hammer, you do what it want”; “The arc is long but it do bend, it do bend”; “The sun a bruised orange, clouds sparse, sky mauve / The light soft as though filtered through gauze.” He’s a novelist and world historian trapped inside the body of a stoned 40-something avant-garde New York rapper equally educated on hip-hop history and Shakespeare. It’s not everyday you hear a rapper (or any musician, for that matter) dedicate entire songs to landscape descriptions—nevermind marrying Zimbabwean politics, gallows humor, and incisive social commentary in the process. The result is shattering, charged, intimate music, that’s as visceral as it is academic.
There’s a pretty common trope about woods, especially emphasized by certain critics, that call him apocalyptic, solemn, paranoid, etc., etc. Not that these are necessarily wrong, but they’re overemphasized. I love woods because he gets at something inherent in the human experience, combining our thorny political past, our inevitably exploitative economic patterns, and our deeply ingrained memories to make sense of our present moment in time. Just like any novel arouses a wide emotional palette, woods’ music is too psychologically complex to be given a catch-all label. He covers heavy topics, sure, but there’s happiness in there; not innocent, untampered happiness, but something deeper—something earned, radiating from the horrors and triumphs he carefully rakes through.
His latest album, Church, feels like hip-hop as coded, emotive personal memoir, combining New York weed lore, the roller coaster ride of a fledgling relationship, and a heaping amount of religious analysis. The result conjures something I like to think of as complex joy. Stewing in murky gray matter, it’s an accomplished feeling coming after and as a result of hardship, laughter, grief, exultation, and all the other ornate sensations of being human. Church exhibits depth in ultra-specific ambiguity without straining for surface-level understanding. The scenes he raps are distinct in detail and affectation while withholding proper nouns, like a collection of especially-short stories that never lose sight of the work’s larger themes.
The three-song stretch to close the album (“Pollo Rico,” “All Jokes Aside,” and “Magdalene”) glimmers with complex joy. On “Pollo Rico” he acknowledges that “this thing was broke from the jump / No point going back and forth over who did what,” which is a bit cheeky, considering his hearty dedication to connecting the scrabbled puzzle pieces of the past. He offers this striking image of visiting a dying friend, filled with celebration and latent mourning: “Hospital vending machine, D2 is the Cheetos / New Year’s Eve, I snuck in the Clicquot / Pollo rico, yuca fries.” The first time he raps the chorus, he closes it with, “I hope it’s nothing but hoes in paradise.” The second, it’s, “I hope it’s nothing but love in paradise.”
“Pollo Rico” makes me want to smile and sob at the same time. It’s woods digging at this shard of memory that’s heartbreaking and heartwarming, finding complex joy in the minutia he shared with a loved one in their passing moments. Those sort of beautiful particulars are what stand tall in the recesses of memory. It’s all we’ve got as humans—sincere little moments taking on greater significance later on, twinkling in our subconscious and making us feel. It’s what great art should aspire to capture.
“Pollo Rico,” and woods’ songwriting throughout Church, remind me of the stubborn joy that author Elizabeth Gilbert embraces about the “poet laureate of her life,” Jack Gilbert. J. Gilbert the poet, as E. Gilbert says in a moving essay for The Atlantic’s “By Heart” series, expounds in his work “a real, mature, sincere joy—not a cheaply earned, ignorant joy. He’s not talking about building a fortress of pleasure against the assault of the world. He’s talking about the miraculousness of moments of wonder and how it seems to be worth it, after all.” She explains that Gilbert’s poetry is a testament to and celebration of “a joy that occurs not despite our suffering, but within it.” In other words, “He says the world is terrible and wonderful, and your obligation is to joy.”
It’s a refreshing way to view the world, in all of its vast range of experience. Of course there’s disaster, poverty, disease, pain. Of course there’s a whole hearth of horrifying tragedy steadily broiling. Gilbert’s way of thinking challenges us to not only acknowledge the maelstrom, but to accept and find joy within the maelstrom. Listening to woods, I can’t help but feel stubborn gladness clawing out from each bellowed word. In the second verse of “Pollo Rico,” he describes survivors of revolution recalling its evils firsthand, being startled awake “thinking ‘bout the ones they left in the forest.” Revolution is complicated, to put it lightly; there’s loss and hardship even if a people succeed in fighting for their freedom, which woods elucidates with candor. “It’s no church in the wild / My uncle told me they can’t bury that many bodies, they burned ‘em in piles / It was dark, I could see his teeth, it wasn’t a smile.” These are chilling truths confronting the listener, fully alive with subtlety and intricacy. It’s easy to label songs like “Pollo Rico” as paranoid or solemn, but there’s a very real complex joy bubbling just underneath the surface.
In a profile of Earl Sweatshirt for The New York Times Magazine, Ismail Muhammad picks apart the Los Angeles former-wunderkind’s denial of fame and tendency toward insular opacity. He describes Earl’s music as “a map of complex joy . . . a fundamentally private thing, something he is willing to share with listeners but without explanatory notes . . . showing us how depression, pleasure, fear, anger, silliness and the whole gamut of human interiority interlock to form something like joy.” Later, he quotes Earl as saying, “‘Joy is something separate from happiness, because happiness is fleeting. I believe joy emanates from somewhere else within you.’” I’ve loved Earl’s music since I was a teenager, thanks in large part to his dedication to the granularity of emotional life. His songs made me deeply aware of my own angst and uncertainty for maybe the first time—and to this day prod at the galaxy of underlying thought pressure-cooking in my brain. And Earl, consequently, is how I got introduced to billy woods.
On the Earl Sweatshirt song featuring Armand Hammer (billy woods’ group with rapper E L U C I D) “Tabula Rasa,” woods commits himself to “live for the living,” as he says it, opposed to the dead. Living for the now instead of the past, no matter how deeply ingrained that past resides within us. He follows this by cooking dinner and watching TV with a significant other: “I made chicken late-night in my boxers, burning up the kitchen / She passed out right when I was done fixing / I watch reruns in the dark, fingers and lips glistening.” It’s not a glamorous scene, not the falling-in-love moment you’d think of when describing a relationship, but it’s real: Lying there with crumbs on your greasy fingers, your partner asleep as reruns flicker in the darkness like a shoddy electronic flame. That’s what romance, and being human, really looks like. As Earl once said, “I feel like any time I’ve been less attached to the truth – no matter what adjective comes before the truth, whether it’s the sad truth, the unfortunate truth, the fortunate truth – I’ve been really, really sad, dejected, and lost. As long as I feel like I’m really looking at the facts, that’s the closest I can get to feeling good, because I’m informed. I know what’s going on.”
There’s this song I haven’t been able to shake lately, that’s been rattling around my head as I go about my day. It’s called “Having Nothin’” by a New York rapper named Ka. Ka grew up in 1970s Brooklyn, and his music describes the hardships and crime he once endured and participated in, wielding dense thickets of double entendre and extended motif. Ka works as a New York City Fire Captain by day—a sort of personal atonement for the sins of his youth, as he’s said in interviews. His music is riddled with pangs of regret and survivor’s remorse, but also a gratitude for the values he’s realized. The chorus to “Having Nothin’” says it all: “Having nothing gave me everything, it gave me everything / Having nothing gave me everything I need.” There’s a weathered pride in his gravelly voice as he champions the person he’s become because of the difficult life he’s lived. This earned pride – this complex joy – is what great art captures at its best.
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
– James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I’m not sure what the true function of art is. I think art can act as a form of escapism; an avenue for cathartic rumination; a place to communicate the complexities of the human experience. But I think it does all of these things best when it’s honest with itself and gives those details in thoughtful depth. When observing art that’s honest and unflinching, you feel something greater as an observer. You feel the creator’s pain, but also their joy, and all the other shades of emotion in between. It becomes an exercise in empathy, expanding your emotional palette and what you know to be true of the human experience. I’ll never meet every type of person, but I can experience art by all sorts of different people, and connect with their triumphs, suffering, and elation all the same. The world’s imponderabilia – that uncertainty of what’s around the corner, the possibility that it’s terrible, wonderful, or more honestly, both – constitutes its real magic. It’s why I love art and music and writing, and it’s why I choose to read and write and forge friendships and try new things and wake up each and every day. I hear it in Ka and Earl Sweatshirt’s music, in Jack Gilbert’s poetry, in billy woods’ “Pollo Rico.” I feel it all around me: In the noise and million-faced shuffle of downtown on a bustling Friday afternoon, in the dirt-caked face of the homeless man who stands outside the grocery store, in the amazing architecture of a dragonfly’s wings as it drifts by me on a summer evening. I feel it in my own experiences: In the warm laughter of my friends while we’re sitting at a bar, in the strain of my parents’ voices when they discuss difficult moments from their past, in the whirlwind of emotions I experience after waking up from a strange dream. I’m not sure what the true function of art is, but I think it’s got something to do with bottling the oddly wonderful experience of being human, in all of its complex joy.
It’s not the worst idea to “write for the dead,” as E L U C I D of Armand Hammer says on their song “Hunter.” woods himself spends so much time yanking out splinters from the cold grip of the departed, battered fragments of history that confound and illuminate. But let’s also take his advice on “Tabula Rasa.” We should “live for the living,” while we still can.
