#thecartertrilogy

[adevotedappraisal]

The Carter Trilogy, part one of five

Introduction: Let's make love in the summertime, and breathe in each other's arms

There's an interesting cultural and historical framing device us Americans have been using in order to make sense of, and to comb out the nappy-headed developments of the past couple of years.  In our interactions with each other, we've resorted to reducing our shared events, and this ol’ President, and this ol’ year in particular, to a television show.   The U.S. President assassinated a top Iranian General at the beginning of the year, and the news was communicated in countless late night jokes and online memes as the raucous events of the season premiere of 'America - The Series.' 

In conversations throughout the year we would reduce the countless and needless complexities of this year into bite-sized episodes, and the countless and needless complexities of the Presidency into a mean ol’ villain or defiant hero in that show.  We do this so we could for a moment, warren order from the disorder of a pandemic, and we do it in order to masticate Trump, in an attempt to find something of cultural value in the marrow there. 

Set against the backdrop of the fall of the American Empire, Presidential Press Secretaries are referred to as mid-season replacements, scandals like Russiagate get packaged by cable news hosts as a storyline culminating in the ratings bonanza Mueller report episode, murder hornets appear as a J.J. Abrams-esque black box mystery, and over video chat we joke to our friends that the interview the President gave on the virus was ‘brought to you by Regeneron’. We do it so we can turn ol’ Trump up when you and the missus need a laugh, or so we can box it all in, get the highlights, and turn it all off sometimes.

Even now, as the results of this Presidential election conclude, we refer to it as the ‘Season Finale’ (a multi-day, multi-episode story arch, if you will).  We pontificate on the next move the President might take with the same confident hand-waving we gave to theories about Rachel and Ross, or about who shot that mean ol’ oil man J R Ewing. Except of course, these are real people up on our television screen that we treat as characters, passing, or not passing real laws, no matter how brazen and cartoonish their villainy might seem.

They are public servants, selected to be dutiful arbiters of democracy.  They are unpackaged and unscripted members of society, in stark contrast to the other faces you would see on television and billboards, those manipulated faces and lives, augmented and born from tinseltown, giant recording companies and whatever technological medium of the day.  Those other faces on television were the “illusion" Howard Beale talked about in the 1976 film Network, a traveling troupe of jugglers, fire-eaters, movie stars, athletes, singers and rappers, all completely separate from reality, striking a pose with a song to sing as soon as you press a button on a remote. Nowadays though, everyone you see is a little of column A, and a little out of column B.

For a solid century, generations of celebrities were fully in column A.  Notoriously private, insular, and sexually closeted, they would spend their days galavanting across the estates of their private Xanadus, appearing every once in a while to grace us with their presence, and fill our hearts with the gospel of America, all glowing and bright up there on that movie or television screen, or curled over the glossed-over pages of magazines, then glowing again illuminated on the flat-screens of our lives. Every now and then a scandal might hit the supermarket rags, or a scathing memoir would be published, but for the most part, celebrities came to us in ordered, scheduled appearances, their actual lives, marriages and drug habits compartmentalized away from that glowing screen I told you about.

Lately though, they're everywhere, with quotes under their faces dispensing grandfatherly advice on our school-mates Facebook page, or appearing on our media scroll without makeup to give cooking advice, or getting into days-long Twitter clashes with some unemployed rando. Every one of them leveraging some personal story, reported first in the news in order to tie in to the release date of their next project.  Rap star Cardi B herself has described her upcoming album as having “my ‘Lemonade’ moments, my personal relationship moments,” a set that wishes to delve into the inner workings of her own troubled marriage to Atlanta, GA rapper Offset.  

And through this monumental change, where actors in crisis, rappers expanding their brand, desperate online characters and season finale plot-lines get mixed up with our actual families, loved ones and our country, we the people have been there, fully comfortable with this conflation, in fact welcoming this with open arms.  So when did we become so comfortable mixing our mediums of entertainment with our frameworks of reality?

Well, I don’t know when this started, perhaps it’s gone on longer than I’m comfortable to admit.  That said, I believe this knotted entanglement of media products and reality, became unmistakable and indelible during the events of three of Beyonce's and Jay Zs albums released in the heart of the 2010s: 2016s Lemonade, 2017s 4:44, and Everything Is Love, from 2018, a Carter trilogy of albums, which came to us through television screens, speakers and ear pods, spinning a yarn about the crisis of a super-star marriage, that we discussed with each other as if it were our own.

After camera footage leaked of an argument between Beyonce, her sister Solange and Jay Z after the 2014 Met Gala, rumours spread concerning the state of their marriage and familial relationships. Normally, unplanned and embarrassing footage like this would have been downplayed, with a vague statement issued. Instead, the next set of releases from the chart-topping couple dealt with the issue head on, a trilogy of albums that gave us a look into the most famous marriage in music and, in the process, cross-pollinated the separated fields between the entertainer and the entertained, giving us an unnerving glimpse, like coming across a worried theme park princess on her smoke break.

The issue was not that a personal story was used in an r&b song --the genre is built on those songs -but rather that the story got bigger than the song. Divorce albums are one-sided affairs, so getting a response record to it gave their story added life every time another album in the saga was released. The story became about the modern American marriage, concerning the overworked wife that believes she can have it all, the prodigal husband, and the lack of communication about the common purpose of this union. 

After a while, the details found in their songs mattered more than the songs themselves, in fact, the personal details became the drawing card to the show. The production on Lemonade’s "Sorry" is a thin summer trifle with squat synth bleats, but the exciting, chopped and screwed introduction of Becky with the good hair obscures that. Jay on "Kill Jay Z" from 4:44 confesses "you egged Solange on, knowing all along all you had to say you was wrong," and it adds a new clue to that fateful night, but was it a good line? It isn't his strongest, as the cadence is awkward, but it took a while to realise, while waiting for the dust to settle, for the band to start up again.

Another look at these monumental albums is warranted then, now that time has blown the debris of gossip blog stories away, so that we can separate the story of Jay and Bey, from the music they released. It is useful, in order to see what worked and what didn't, but also to discern the difference between the person presenting the show, and the show itself, for this will be an invaluable tool in the decade ahead of us, as more celebrities from the lighted stage immigrate in and out of our lives. It is an exercise though, that our bodies secretly undertook over the years as we returned to this or that song throughout this trilogy, to accompany us through a sobering chapter in our lives, or to remind us of that hour that love shined brightest, during the restless summertime, when we looked at each other, felt something realer than high definition, and we breathed in each other's arms.