{"id":4164,"date":"2021-02-01T08:52:46","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T08:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=4164"},"modified":"2021-02-01T10:34:38","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T10:34:38","slug":"whole-new-meanings-of-presidential","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/02\/01\/whole-new-meanings-of-presidential\/","title":{"rendered":"WHOLE NEW MEANINGS of \u00b4Presidential.\u00b4"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WHOLE NEW MEANINGS of \u00b4Presidential.\u00b4<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick reads Adesola Thomas at Paste on-line<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
American new wave band Talking Heads (Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, David Byrne), Bologna, Italy, 1982. (Photo by Luciano Viti\/Getty Images)<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, in Don\u2019t Worry About The Government, jokes about the pleasure of pausing the work day to entertain the company of \u00b4loved ones\u00b4 who, like \u00b4civil servants,\u00b4(wink, wink) \u00b4work so hard and try to be strong.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As remembered, and interpreted by journalist Adesola Thomas the track is sentimental without being saccharine, and sonically. It has, she says, allowed her to occasionally re-enter a world that has been deemed mostly inaccessible due to necessary pandemic restrictions\u2014a world in which she marvels at \u00b4the clouds that move across the sky\u00b4 and conjure gratitude for \u00b4people that are working for (her).\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless as she revisited the song after the recent insurrection in The White House and again when hearing about the \u201ccivil servant\u201d at the State Department, who prematurely issued an \u00b4out of office\u00b4 announce about Trump and his VP, Adesola couldn\u2019t help but wonder: is Don\u2019t Worry About The Government truly an optimistic ditty about anchoring your joy in moments of levity and cultivating respect for community members? Or is it an ironic song about needing to distract ourselves from the frustrating limitations of our institutions?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Adesola Thomas  graduated with high honours from Emory University in May of 2020 with a double major in Political Science and English. She is enthusiastic and highly effective at synthesizing the relationship between politics and popular culture in arts journalism and academic style writing. Adesola is interested in the intersection between public policy, political dialogue and the arts and whilst serving as a Creative Producer at Netflix Queue, after graduating from Ebony university, she is also an occasional contributor to Paste on-line magazine on subjects related to her interests. As a screenwriter and culture writer Adesola loves talking about Annette Benning\u2019s performance in 20th Century Women, \u2026 and making lasagna.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Music is implicitly or otherwise political,\u00b4 she says\u00b4, referencing her Talking Heads article. \u00b4It reflects the varied ways personal experience shapes our perceptions of the world, how people navigate those perceptions and exercise their agency. What\u2019s so political about the Baha Men\u2019s calypso earworm \u201cWho Lets the Dogs Out,\u201d or contrastingly, Baby Keem\u2019s laid back cunnilingus-centric banger \u201cOrange Soda\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u00b4ll be glad you asked because although this article was about the Talking Heads and the resonance of their music as President-elect Joe Biden took office, Adesola further illustrated the presence of political power in all music, with a sideways glance at those two songs..<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
who let the dogs out<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4While we attribute Who Let The Dogs Out to the Baha Men, they did not originally release the song,\u00b4 she told Paste readers. \u00b4In fact, filmmaker Ben Sisto made an entire documentary<\/a> about how the song, which has been released multiple times over the past 40 years by various artists, presents \u00b4one of the most complicated \u2026 copyrighting cases in music history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we are mostly unsure who first let the dogs out, and why people were so receptive to the question when it was presented for the umpteenth time by Carribean men in Hawaiian shirts. The politics of the song exist via its marketing and ownership context.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has a way with words for making a point doesn\u00b4t she?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Baby Keem<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4As for Orange Soda,\u00b4 she continued, \u00b4that was a rap staple of 2020, there\u2019s a legacy of the link between Black masculinized sexual prowess and the focalization of female pleasure in rap and hip-hop culture. So when Baby Keem says \u201cBitch sit on my face I attack that,\u201d not only is the speaker instigating oral sex, he is tethering his bravado to his interest in centering his partner\u2019s fulfillment. These are the gendered and racialized politics of desire.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our readers here at Sidetracks & Detours are probably of a lightly older age-demographic than are Adesola\u00b4s usual reader base, and might therefore be wondering how this logic can applied to Don\u2019t Worry About the Government. We have to focus, Adesola says, \u00b4not only on what Byrne sings, but also on the multiplicity of things those lyrics gesture towards and ultimately, evoke for listeners. Perhaps it is less important to deliberately pinpoint whether this Talking Heads song was designed to be sincere or biting, and more important to consider why the tension within that question may be the point.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adesola argues that \u00b4when Byrne sings, \u00b4I\u2019m a lucky to live in my building\u00b4 and \u00b4My building has every convenience \/ It\u2019s gonna make life easy for me,\u00b4 he could be voicing the satisfaction that accompanies having a reliable place of one\u2019s own, or he could be voicing the empty measurements of personal worth America generationally ascribes to convenience and property ownership.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Talking Heads<\/em><\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Fans familiar with Talking Heads\u00b4 material will recall the song\u00b4s movement from the nature scene in the song\u2019s opening stanza with the fragrant \u00b4pine trees\u00b4 and \u00b4peaches in the woods\u00b4 to the \u00b4highway that goes to the building\u00b4 signals a shift in environment that could be a celebration of urban sprawl or sequestration away from that which is intrinsic or natural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4The building in that latter reading,\u00b4 says Adesola, \u00b4then becomes a distancing element from loved ones, rather than a place of pure communion for the speaker.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She believes that, rather than cancelling each other out, all of them allow the song to offer something new with nearly every listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8During some listens, perhaps we resonate more with the joy of the loved one that is visiting the speaker who lives in the proverbial building,\u00b4 she suggests but the she switches the argument.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Maybe during other listens, Byrne\u2019s \u00b4It\u2019s gonna make life easy for me\u00b4 harkens back to times when we\u2019ve naively believed that a new apartment or city, newfound wealth or status, or Presidential administration would help us fulfill our (or their?)<\/em> idealized version of personhood or citizenship. We are not tasked to select the ironic bits over the sincere bits or vice versa because all of those things are overlaid and interwoven. They sit inside the same song, waiting to be seen from each and every purview.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Adesola reckons that the beauty of Don\u2019t Worry About The Government and its political design, deliberately or otherwise, is that it echoes the possibilities the listener hears inside of it. Its majesty is in the riddle of its aims. And for the three-or-so minutes of the song\u2019s duration, she is enraptured by the nature scenes, the highway, the clouds, the building, the civil servants in D.C and the puzzle at the heart of the song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00b4Paradoxically, for those few delectable, fleeting moments,\u00b4 she says, I stop worrying about the government.\u00b4\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is how a panacea works, isn\u00b4t it? As opium for the masses?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are not tasked to select the ironic bits over the sincere bits or vice versa because all of those things are overlaid and interwoven. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4170,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,45,66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-aata","category-music","category-protest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4164"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4172,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4164\/revisions\/4172"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4170"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}