In times when too many things make too little sense -- for instance, the brazen millionaire crooks and liars that run our government in both its public and its private forms -- you grasp at anything in the culture that looks positive, promising. Pathetic pastime though it can seem, one is helpless to do otherwise. And pop music is the perfect grasping place precisely because it has always been vast and varied enough to justify any worldview -- depending on the needs of the moment, it will confirm the rosiest wishes, or the direst fears.
There are times when the mainstream culture is so overbearingly cheerful, sanitary, or somnolent that it drives you to seek out any ugliness or contrary activity you can find. That's how punk happened. Other times, like right now, when the official American culture bespeaks arrogance, selfishness, and contempt for all but the narrowest, most backward values -- each celebrated, under a rubric like "pride" or "tradition" or "stay the course," as a fortifying national virtue -- you tend to look for signs that alternatives still exist, that progress is being made.
Sometimes these signs of positivity emerge from a piece of music because the artist has placed them there; sometimes because the music transcends, or triumphs over, mere intention and becomes the sign -- one that perhaps only you can see, and only because you went looking for it. Be, the sixth album by the veteran rapper Common, would be an instance of the former, while Mariah Carey's hit comeback, The Emancipation of Mimi, exemplifies the latter.
The new Mariah is a hip-hop-toughened, millennium-shrewd version of the insufferable virtuoso who first hit with "Visions of Love" in 1990; who played the compliant Trilby to a Svengali manager-husband; and who purveyed an endless run of bottom-heavy ballads and dopey bubblefunk, each megahit a monolith of crap centered on the star's utter blankness of personality. Somewhere along the line the hits stopped coming, the Svengali was ditched, a movie vehicle crashed, and a nervous breakdown was logged. Now a phoenix rises from the crap. With The Emancipation of Mimi -- "Mimi" being the singer's true post-Trilby self, as in "Me! Me!" -- Carey returns to declare herself a new woman, with new music and a new attitude. In addition to an updated production style and cutting-edge guest stars, the album sports a number of stanzas extolling Mariah-Mimi's rebirth as a liberated diva.
It is largely in spite of Carey's self-presentation that something useful and inspiriting gets across. Mimi positions itself as an unappealing program of self-congratulation and ego-stroking, manifesto of the put-upon superstar-survivor making her eternal return as a better diva and a bigger star. But against all odds, the album doesn't suck. In fact, it is pretty good, deliriously so on a few occasions. If fully half of it is merely routine R&B of this moment, the other half is light, infectious, helplessly charming, and infused with summer breeze in the way that only pop music, of all arts known to man or woman, can be.
Songs like "We Belong Together" and "Mine Again" have enough vocal trapeze work and coy sexuality to echo Carey's earlier hits; but the new settings are stripped down and pointed up, with a canny '70s influence for flavor -- organ tootles and faux flutes, echoes of Minnie Riperton and other peaceful bourgeois stylists. But the album stays alive on its 21st-century sense of funk and fun. "Say Somethin'" has a piping toy organ, Snoop Dogg cameo, and marvelous stuttering rhythmic hook. "Stay the Night," with its tough beat, fat bass, and agitated vocal, is all hook, all hunger, throwing itself forward on panic and movement for its own sake. Rubbery riffs stretch out beneath "Get Your Number," a sex-you-up track centered on Carey's vocal but hooked on Jermaine Dupri's looped cry of "Damn!" -- the exclamation not arrogant but horny, and infinitely more appealing for that.
This is commercial music, and Carey is clearly out to rejoin the multiplatinum galaxy. But what rockists will never appreciate, and racists never defeat, is the singular wonder of unabashedly commercial pop aimed at a cross-cultural audience and done with taste, flair, and delight in detail. So there is a difference between the Mariah of 10 years ago, her musical marshmallows helping to fatten our collective ass, and the Mariah of now, singing songs with sinew and humor and groove. While her new stance of female self-empowerment may be a standard diva pose, it's among the better ones, and from Salt-N-Pepa to En Vogue to Mary J. Blige, it's generated some of the hottest dance music of the last 15 years. If you don't think that's of vital sociocultural value, imagine how free we'd be in a society that allowed nothing but the waltz.
Common (real name Lonnie Lynn) plays his social role more consciously than Carey: The cover of Be carries endorsements for HIV testing and his own fledgling community-action camp, the Common Ground Foundation. The album comes covered in the influence of executive producer Kanye West, maker of last year's smash The College Dropout and proponent of a style that takes musically from gangsta rap but is otherwise an explicit alternative to it. Common's music is commercial but not mindlessly so, more eclectic than most music today, and lyrically concerned with blackness more than bling, people more than pimps.
For a start, the sexual dynamics of Be are uncommonly varied and loving by pop standards, black or white. The album's "Intro" name-checks such heroes of black maleness as Malcolm X, John Coltrane, and Yusef Lateef, but only as prelude to the greatness Common imagines for his daughter: "I look into my daughter's eyes / and realize I'ma learn through her." "Faithful," with its great high-pitched chorus -- a 1974 D.J. Rogers soul refrain on fast-forward -- asks how men would behave if they knew God was a woman. On "Testify," Common delivers a fast rap full of overcomplicated verbiage, while behind him a skipped-and-sampled female voice blithely consumes all the listener's attention.
Be could remind you of Marvin Gaye's 1971 What's Going On even if you don't know that Common often credits Gaye's influence, or that the late Prince of Motown appears among his numerous '70s samples. Both albums take black community -- where it is, where it's going, where it came from -- as the running theme, and follow it from the streets to the skies. Both Gaye and Common also convey a complicated sense of relationships -- between man and woman, dream and reality, raunch and respect, the past and the future.
The conspicuous presence of revolutionary proto-rappers The Last Poets on "The Corner" honors the link Common feels between himself and his traditions. It takes place against a teeming aural cityscape, sounds of children and traffic, August heat and average chaos -- the time frame could be 1970, it could be now -- overlaid with an older man's lamenting remembrance of how the corner used to be.
The two-part closer, "It's Your World," is a magnificently complex and resonant construction. In Part 1, Common witnesses two "children of crack and rap," a neighborhood thug and a young prostitute -- both barely more than children, both looking death in the face, yet both grasping at the great American dream of starting over: "I still wanna see California." This folds into a cascading interlude of children's voices proclaiming what they want to be ("a superstar … a duck … the first African American female president"), and then into Part 2, an instructive recitation delivered in warm, placid tones by Common's own father, "Pops": “Be high when you're low, be on time but knowing to go / Be cautious of the road to college, taking a detour through Vietnam or the Middle East / Be at full strength when walking through the valley / Be that last one of 144,000, be the resident of that 12th house / Be eternal.”
It's corny, didactic, and exhilarating. The thug, the Last Poet, the prostitute, the father, the kid who wants to be a duck: As Be swirls to its climax, all the times, places, wishes, and voices Common has gathered overlap and talk back, find their common ground in a memory of the past, a dream of the future.
All very fine. But what do two singers and their latest moneymakers have to do with the soul of the nation? This, maybe:
By nature of who they are and the music they make, Mariah Carey and Common are something very important right now: constructive, loving occupants of the fraught matrix where race, gender, and sexuality meet in this country. It's a harsh place to be, that unholy tangle of violent prejudices that will either -- if it is ever unwound -- save America or -- if it is crushed by conservative revision, biblical blather, and the plain hatred that piggybacks on both -- destroy it.
That matrix is full of awful contradictions, gobs of spit in the weeping face of human logic. There are so many struggles that should be joined, but instead continue to work at odds. Why do whites still fear blacks when they're more likely to meet violence at the hands of another white person? Why does so much black pop music demean women when matriarchy is so common in the black family? Why do so many blacks and Latinos, oppressed minorities themselves, hate gays so intensely?
There are, of course, answers to these questions: religion, class, culture, masculinity gone mad. Sound, informed, historically specific answers, in response to which one can only nod and say, “Yes, it was ever thus.” There are answers, and none of them even begins to make sense.
So I find it joyful that much about Mariah Carey and Common works against these asinine, pride-based hatreds, and wondrous that their music issues from this world but conjures another, where the change has already come. Carey is biracial, and appeals to gay audiences as well as straight ones. Common deals with sex and stereotype, the black past and the American present in terms that are positive without being vapid. Both counteract the poisonous divisions of our time, either explicitly, by addressing them (Common), or implicitly, by dissolving them in pop's magic fizz (Carey). And both have done that by creating surprising, invigorating, physically undeniable music.
Carey still acts the haughty, jiggling airhead when it suits her, and Common flashes just enough "bitches" and "niggaz" to escape the politically correct tag. But even this needn't be a bad thing, given the whole picture. Pop should never have all the right answers, be anyone's ethical beacon or moral paradigm; when it goes that route, you get Up With People -- or the worst of today's country music, with its defensive flag waving, its Wal-Mart patriotism. If pop is, musically speaking, an evolving synthesis, then on its cultural and ethical levels it should likewise be an ongoing experiment, a balancing of democratic elements in which the shock of the new emerges from the clutter of cliché, and tableaux of liberation spontaneously form within the false, confining frame of the status quo.
Anyone who believes that such flashes and glimpses -- of something happier, better, freer -- can't have large effects on the way we think and act doesn't know about Elvis Presley, or Chuck Berry, or the Beatles, or Berry Gordy, or punk, or disco, or pop's key role in the long-gestating liberation movements of Russia and Eastern Europe from the '50s onward. Artists and actions like these demonstrate that if we need art to distill and contain our fears that damnation is irrevocable, we also need it to embody and embolden our hopes that nobler days are coming. Right now, both Mariah Carey and Common have parts to play in that process.
Maybe grasping for good omens in transient culture is not so pathetic a pastime, then -- no more so than the child's impulse to chase fireflies at dusk, to capture a constellation of flickering lights in a jar. Pop culture in all its forms exists not merely to take our money or stroke our vanity but to lend weight to our hopes; that's why anyone with any hope left is likely to need it badly. Where else but in the symbolic realms of culture and parallel universes of art are we going to maintain any sense of the world we could be living in, while in the same moment experiencing an immediate and relevant product of the world we are living in?
Devin McKinney is the author of Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
