Esperanza, Part Two: After The Crazy
Yesterday, we talked a bit about Esperanza Spalding. It's hard to believe that it's been ten years since Pat Metheny brought her debut record, Junjo, to the attention of the music world. She is now thirty-one years old.
Her newest record, Emily's D+Evolution, is supposedly the result of a night when she started receiving internal communications from "Emily", a newly-developed alternate personality or ego. That may be, but the primary reason the record is of interest to a general audience is this: it's about The Wall.
Musically, Emily's D+Evolution is a massive prog-rock effort. Think of it as Living Colour with Jaco Pastorius and Stanley Clarke influence, fronted by Esperanza's strong and fluid voice. It's a drummer's nightmare; it's a wonder that the live band in the top video only flubs "Good Lava" once, because there's isn't a song on the record that maintains a tempo for any useful length of time. An early review of Esperanza's work, ten years ago, cited the "juvenilia" of the lyrics and the fact that the music lacked "a crucial measure of modesty".
If that reviewer thought that "I Know You Know" was immodest, G-d only knows what he thinks of "Good Lava", the relevant lyrics of which I've posted below:
See this pretty girl? Watch this pretty girl flow Lone Ranger I see you like the view Wondering from a distance what my pretty peak can do Come brave me ... Oh good lava We all know you wanna See this pretty girl flow You wanna
This is very much in the tradition of explicit black American female sexuality --- think Bessie Smith talking about needing a little sugar in her bowl --- but it's new to Esperanza. Note, too, the near-desperate combination of ego and forthright sexuality: "Watch this pretty girl flow." The flow is two-fold: she's "flowing" in the sense of rapping and/or singing, and her "lava" is "flowing" from the "pretty peak" of her mons veneris.
Combine that with the deliberately un-sexy look of her "Emily" character and the rest is strangely off-putting. Esperanza, who was never more than about a six out of ten on her best day, putting on weird glasses and a flower-print suit before she pays two people to stand behind her and sing "See this pretty girl flow." The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
Most of the record is about sex, not love, reaching its thematic peak with "One":
Gravity does burn inside me I would orbit all who invite me Oh, then again There could be one so strong It stops the world and my heart's spinning One to prove what I've always known ... Devolution burns inside me I would dive in all who delight me Oh, then again There could be one so strong It stops the world and my heart's spinning One to prove what I've always known But couldn't meet
This song might as well have been written by the infamous "Heartiste" and posted in the RedPill subreddit. Having burned her twenties advancing her career, Emily is at a point where she'll fuck anybody of interest to her, just out of boredom. But she's also thinking about that "one" who could stop her heart and make her settle down. Given that she wrote the song somewhere around her thirtieth birthday, it's almost hilariously stereotypical:
* Young, beautiful woman does whatever she wants... * ...until she turns thirty... * ...at which point she insists that she is a "pretty girl"... * ...and begins to focus on the idea of finding some super-dude to make her settle down.
What form would that settling down take? "Unconditional Love" makes it plain:
For my finale, waiting Off in the wings, to sing the last song And when we’re done pretending Throw me a white bouquet ... Oh I, close the curtain behind me And enclose me in your arms, oh If your arms would invite me, oh ... We could change the whole story of love Same old play I’m getting tired of No more acting these predictable roles Just us living unconditional love
Once again we see the profound disservice done to women by our consumer culture. We tell them to spend their youth in the gym every morning, the office all day, and on Tinder every evening. And when they can't deny their own biological programming any longer, we tell them that it will all work out. That you can wait until you're thirty, or thirty-five, or forty to have children and a family and a single strong commitment.
What we don't tell them is that following that path significantly degrades the quality of the man and the situation that they will eventually get. A beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman is like a man of the same age with a ten-million-dollar trust fund; ten years later, she's in the same place the trustafarian would be if he spent $9.5 million of that money. Not destitute, not worthless, but with far fewer options. Run the clock another ten years: a decent-looking 42-year-old woman is going to primarily provoke the interest of men in their fifties and sixties.
It is beyond the scope of this blog, indeed the scope of my abilities, to provide a solution to that problem. Our modern society has decided that we are comfortable throwing away the lessons learned by humanity over the past 100,000 years and replacing them with a series of wishful-thinking fantasies conjured up from our own spoiled childhoods and our desire to see those childhoods never end. Our newsstands are full of magazines saying, in essence, that Emily, with her decade-plus of sexual experience, her bitterness, and her limited childbearing years, is a better and more desirable person than Esperanza at twenty-two.
Maybe that's so. But it's also so that at the age of forty, women essentially disappear. Or they feel like they've disappeared, anyway. No surprise, then, that the only steady beat in Emily's D+Evolution is the one that you only hear by inference: the ticking of a biological clock.