You don’t recall when you became aware of the separateness of the adlib. At first, it all came at once—beat and words, rhythm and verse—and gradually, well after the first effects settled and resolved, and when you started to feel beyond your own experience to that of the artist—only then could you discern and handle the buried treasures you had accumulated over all those years …
… What finally took you, though, from being encompassed by language and sound together to looking back and feeling the hidden accumulated force of the adlib, was Blonde. Through the creation of that album, experience shed its frivolous contingencies and kept the ones that matter—and what Frank spoke fit into all those pockets of feeling that are beyond words, that need sound to fill your whole body, to expand into the spaces you didn’t know were unfilled, until …
… (Appropriate that it should be Blonde that unlocked the adlib, since it threatens to dissolve artist and listener: in suffusing you with the artist so richly, you become so textured with the feeling of how things are and how we exist in relation to them—that nothing is communicated) …
… Frank wasn’t using English. English was somewhere he had ended up, like so many millions, and he took to it, he stayed inside English but never made his home there …
… (Some escape English, but who escapes language, and how to?) …
… “Pink + White” features the first hoot—sunrise-like, gentle bird-twittering in the back, this one beams out with pure daylight-readiness—bottomed out with that “yeah, yeah” both shouldering and dismissing the burden of the day—and how the echo of the “showed me” is so much like how things are shown and taken on, and how the farewell at the end of the chorus is the end of being shown, of that “glory from above”—and then you re-link with the hoot at the end: steelier, keener, and more alone now …
… (You try to recall whether you heard that frictional sound—of chairs being moved?—at the outset of the album, the distinct sense of it being both driven by a human hand, and yet fear of the limits of what the human hand can do—and you aren’t sure, but the search makes it harder to ignore, so you lean towards Yes) …
… And on “Solo,” that testament to living as an animal and living in your mind at the same time, after the organ—which has filled the imagined space between the individual and God, climbing to the peaks of vaults and spires, and now filling the space in your headphone—setting the scene for the elevation of solitude through some form of communion—here, animal communion (through exemplary physical force, or dancing with your own sentience)—and that bird chirping, not a natural sound (in fact a Todd Rundgren sample) but intrusion, intrusion, intrusion—then what you make of your own solitude: Solo being sung by and at the singer, who responds with that first S sound repeated to affirm his own engagement with aloneness, so he can have one movement away from the pure, full word, and the pure, full isolation it generically conveys—to take some personal stake out of the word, to lay claim to the part of it that applies to him in the moment: and before the chorus, the sound of a rising crash—of the outside coming in, and the inside moving out …
… That “heh” after “won’t let you fly solo,” stocked with knowledge and cynicism: of the structural lapse between gay love and straight bonds—the family curtailing freedom with its fate-determining arrangements, both pain-inducing and unenviable to the singer— and a superior yet vulnerable smugness that straight love remains inscribed in the lame constrictions of law, the state, the womb …
… You always sensed that the emotional climax of the song was in the suite of hoots (3:20) that hit you with the solitude of a packless wolf, interrupted by the self-awareness of “by myself” that recedes the singer back into the human— the recognized and stated, communicated and understood—and he says it with the disappointment you share, standing now outside the space where the transcendent is possible: the God substitutes, phone and drugs, that created an imagined or distant audience, those intrusions that offer a way out—and those amused yelps, trailing off like footstep echoes, the crash of self-talk and self-laughter leaving just the organ and a weak hurtling sound: aloneness and togetherness arriving and raising and leaving nothing: sound a trail of disappearance, like an animal with no grave—from solitude in the world to a world without a particular solitude, and no legacy of the loss but the song …
… And those intrusive sounds that come into “Skyline To”—the chop of the morning (0:56), with the heft of a palm-edge coming down, and those signifiers — blur, haze — of the moments of self-awareness that root you in the way you are being taken away from the moment, to smoke the drug that both blurs and clarifies—(the speedboat and Congo lines coming down diagonal across memories, impressions and facts of other material realities yanked inside your own subjectivity)—a passage of time the end of which you are made aware at the point you are dislocated from it—these quick portals out of the verse, just before you have to come back into sense making, the prayer before a dive back into meaning—and smoking became one way to resist getting older, to force the child back into you, the impression of feeling time more slowly, or having more time than you really do, as your adult self would put it …
… The double tracking specifies the precise differentiation of pains—on “Self Control,” the gorgeous wish to have “grown up on the same advice “and for “our time” to be “right,” the permanent alienation from that sublimely ended state of permanent security was so palpable to you as the second voice dragged the message-carrying singing away from its conceptual completeness, and towards its emotional incompleteness—but it’s the way that second vocal cuts off when “right” does, confirming the end of the wish in light of reality …
… And that gasp (3:19), as you are pushed against the wall housing the space of silence just before the full choral unleashing of the (potential) glory of your I …
… And with that “yeah” (3:42), the knowledge of limitations, the observance of your emotion outside of you that comes from the sounds you produce by yourself: how you self-steel against the foreknown impermanence of love, the seasonal inevitability of leaving the pairdom that fills your heart in a way that you cannot by yourself …
… How on “Provider”, amid that rise and fall in the melody on the word “loops” closing the loop of internal isolation, the circular drive of consciousness; those two /k/ less coos (2:56) come in after a period of unrest and groundbreak, and even bereft of the ritualized certainties of birdsong, the identical pair of sounds is self-completing like the form of it …
… The unexpected delight of that declaration of near-independence through the auto-tailored car (“transportation handmade / and I know it better than most people”) on “Nights”, with all those nuances—the impossibility of true separation as an individual (you must take from the codes of others—even if mostly obscurely—and they can see into yours) sensed in that protective parting of sound “j’ih,” (0:29) with its blunt phonetic force; and how that “(b)iii(tch)” (0:51) needs the music to stop to be able to self-gather, a breath in the song, and how it seems to sound outside of the arena of communication: it sounds to you like he’s issuing it to himself and with a direction or force but no object, no hope of exterior resolution, not in rehearsal for another person—and how it partitions need and telling, with language the bridge between them—how its privateness acknowledges that crying out is limited by the need to return to a state where mutual need-meeting can resume, before the imagined “tell you”—and the sacrifice of maintaining ball and weed sacks at full capacity indicating loyalty of love in absentia …
… Blonde turned on the lights in those dark corridors that you had walked down, and now you went back into them, seeing all the things you had passed by, and not known …
… You remember how Sly’s pain emerged on “Just Like a Baby” through howls and cries—channeling little tortures too particular for words—gargled from the back of his throat, funneled through howl-pursed lips, bounding up from a mouth wide open—and then finally curling and winding up, first into the dense flatness of the mix like weave into fabric …
… You remember all of it, somewhere inside you—it chimes either in memory or re-hearing: the dog-pant (1:51); the winding stretch of a baby crying (2:54) looking for words but not yet knowing any—and now Sly escaping those words, knowing they are not enough—but it’s too late as an adult—too late to cry with too much purity, too late in life …
… But it was impossible for him to not cry, because words had failed him (because others had failed him), and how Sly affirmed that by recording an album that retreated from the world (of shared progress and communication) into permanent private pain; pain that he has never seemed to leave—and that these sounds emerged signaled his final distance from others …
… And on “Time”, how he made that so clear, after the astonishing “time, they say, is the answer / but I don’t believe it”, he produces that sound (“j’hh”) that never left your own throat, travelled there through your ears and lodged itself there permanently—and it doubled up on the lump in your throat that arises just before you say anything, before even the attempt to be understood (when everything might die)—before even that, when you speak in solitude—to the next person who might understand you—and you choke not on yourself alone, but on yourself in relation to others …
… Sly moved from the song (transcribable, transportable) to a fabricated (in the material sense) mixture of sound, voices climbing around one another like roots and branches …
… And how it was those twists of hurt that travelled to Voodoo, that you heard so many years before There’s a Riot Goin’ On—travelled from Sly to D’Angelo like a howl crosses a forest, and on “One Mo’ Gin” the first minutes are a rainforest of gasps and laughs and whispers and partial- orgasms—that first “sure is good to see you again” sounding like a man reclining (as Sly often did for when recording Riot), speaking into the air, with the ceiling as a canvas for the absent other—and her initial affirmation, “I missed you too,” turns out to be evanescent …
… There’s already a struggle with “some good” (clenched, stuttering, uncertain on the subject of what is good) in contrast to “some for the bad” (followed by a highly articulate melodic run) and the “bay-bays” across the track, with all of their pleading, insisting, asserting, faltering hunger—the two syllables like tugs on the heart, with rises and falls in desperation, shifting attitudes towards realizations of the impossibility of re-kindling …
… At 4:05, he has to expel something (that he can only get rid of through the larynx, but which is neither word nor breath) to sing that fragile, deceptively pure word, baby, also at the heart of “Just Like”, Sly’s song about growing down as growing up (as he got his sister to sing on “Luv n’Haight”)— he exhales it, and exhales, quietly, ‘to himself’ …
[…]
… And you remember: …
… The opening salvo of internal rancor on The Roots’ Rising Down, and how you freshly discern Malik B’s two OKs at the start of “Lost Desire”, how you parsed part of an entire life between them. They evoked a whole struggle: with the first: acceptance, an almost imperceptible self-steeling nod; an uh-huh that quietly seeks sense as a link; and with the second—just before the plunge, resignation to action …
… And on “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)”, Questlove’s mediation (“turn Tariq up”) before the Black Thought onslaught that follows, moving the track from an abstract exercise in technical prowess into a glimpse of the assembly of a stage before a monologue—that additional need to provide focus on Thought a revelation of his distinctly team-embedded quality among great rappers …
… And that additional layer of mediation provided by Quest on “Upper Egypt” from “Dilla Joints”, that tribute to the fallen maestro—as Quest leads guitarist Captain Kirk Douglas into the track, as if you hear someone—crucially, a drummer as bandleader—programming people instead of pads, leading off with that satisfying yeah—the satisfaction between and beyond heart-beat and machine-beat being Dilla’s ultimate gift, and you hear and feel how the band searches for that live looseness in coming to that precision again—Dilla having harvested it from live music, and turned it into his own, and changed perceptions of the relationship between man and machine and tempo and time, and now …
… How Pusha’s self-alienated and self-alienating Yeugh! reaches into his self-transformation into the object of his own observational fixation, the bodily-reactive aspect of his engagement with reality: the desire to maximize proportions, stakes—to take things to their limit to discover what they are, and to reveal them in their vulgarity …
… (And how his watch the body drop fluently tied a lyrical felling with the subject matter it was based on) …
… And from there you contrast the utterly definitive Push. that signs off “The Story of Adidon” with the eye-expanded excitement of the Push: injunction that comes after the declaration that inter-state trafficking’s alive! on “Come Back Baby”, the last word of which Pusha reaches to the back of his throat to summon almost in the manner of the Yeugh! adlib, so suddenly does it open the channel of glee runs through and under the visible economy, to the horror underneath it …
… Ka, among the most solitary of current MCs, the whisper-rapper: his multi-track subtlety reflecting all the hues of his obscure agony: that go on “Grapes of Wrath”—going as leaving, as disappearing: as how things ‘go’ and to where things ‘go’ and to proceed by ‘going’— the word itself ‘going farther’ through echo as Ka does, into his sorrow—and it’s a damn shame! repeating twice, turning into a generic chant just as it becomes more insistent, revealing the futility of protest against overwhelming conditions, that the farther you go in the more you illustrate your own limitations …
… I ain’t sure how I made it (“Knighthood”) flickering between the aspects of its claim, and ending up outside the beat and music—with the rapper finally saying it—struggling to—as if he became separated immediately as the song ends from that controlled performance of the past, and just became the guy who lived it …
… How Suspect (who sounds like an artist when he’s flowing to the free-rhythms of his own shit-talking and like a goon when he’s rapping on beat) found a place for a whole anthem comprised of adlibs at the start of “FBG”, a track whose introduction is its center: the dancing swagger of his taunts replete with self-completing dramatic lilts and tilts …
… How on “Figaro” DOOM arrests and re-directs the whirl and tumble of drums and organ with that Hm, which always struck you as poised between being overtaken and directing the flow of things—you have a permanent sense of that opening being a legitimate entry into something decisively absorbing, and you still bear the mark of that expectation: it still seems that Hm is what unleashes the new beat, new train of thought; it is impossible to imagine that verse without the liminal consciousness created by it …
… And that alright on Earl’s “Grief” bringing him out of a squelching morass and into pain as process …
… Aceyalone’s “Makeba”, that study of lost and found love—of proximity and distance and calculations and decisions made because of them—opening with a perfectly weighted disclaimer: …This is not a love ballad / But it is a slow song… —and that the drums come in between the two parts rendering tangible that dissection of how genre inflects reality and reality rejects it…
… Ghostface lashing out at his aides for not providing him with a banana Nutrament on “Biscuits”, the abrupt antagonism so thoroughly undermining the stirring horns and keys of the music—the guaranteed surprise and amusement of the unfitting nature of opening an album with such solemn pettiness …
… And the extended imaginative foray on “Glaciers of Ice,” with him deliriously dreaming of reality transformed through customized shoes, how you can feel his eyes peeling back (woo!): the rush of narcotically stimulated visions of fresh colours …
… And then Raekwon’s four Yos as if he’s beating the beat back just as it engulfs him …
… (There the Yos are like punches, but there’s Denzel Curry’s “YOO,” where Yo becomes every other word; an open and free hand, capable of caressing, shaking, approving, rejecting…) …
… And the control and anger, martial art- like, of U-God’s Yeah, yo … Gimme the cue on “Bells of War,” the way the precise placement drew you back to the track, and it became a form of preparation or rehearsal, setting yourself up in the spirit of his approach …
… And just how justified Rae’s fake fucks felt at the end of “Duck Seazon” …
… Against Calico, Loaded Lux’s slivery, splintery yeah (38.31), running his hand over his face to refresh his momentum …
… The way that the what? with which Dylan (with his history of not conveying information to his band before recording) ends the only version of “She’s Your Lover Now” signaled the end not just of the take, but the life of the song …
… And the raucous background voices of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” that never really leave dialogue with the rest of Blonde on Blonde …
… The drawn-out well… which opens “Absolutely Sweet Marie” ends just as the drums finish building up and enter the regularity of the track, grooving itself onto your mind as one form of that mood shift before something is said when its nature is already revealed …
… President T rounding off his Tim & Barry TV freestyle with I said…, a call backwards, retro-activating everything he just rapped …
… The fuzzy, recriminatory spikes of Cody Chesnutt’s “Bitch, I’m Broke”: its sense of relief to be able to spill over the beat, at having a frame in which to unleash, unload into, instead of ‘filling’ …
… Kurt Cobain’s perfectly weighted moderate rock threat before the onslaught of “Tourette’s” …
… How on “Camay” the giddy lift in Cappadonna’s you smokin’ ? embodies the thrill of an invitation: what will happen after the inhalation, which turn things will take, a guide to the uncertainty as to how one tale of seduction will be measured against another …
… And Giggs capturing the moment when victory is won over the past (there’s some- thing to his interest in rocking chairs), when on “The Essence”—itself a sequel to the less peaceful “Pain is The Essence”, one of his most exposed tracks—weed exhalation and laughter become a looped sonic backdrop, and the realization of needing an ashtray to gather the past ebbs away, and he embraces the decision to ash elsewhere (the same decision that Kanye laments as a sign of an unkempt mental and therefore social life on “I Thought About Killing You”), and smoke and laughter fill the booth together
…
… (All those thousands of people exhaling as they heard it, looking for an ashtray) …
… On “Slippin’ ”, how the contemplative play of Giggs’ opening words (“could this be the memory of… when it was hard for us”), followed by a chuckle-cough, reveals that having passed through real difficulty into laughter, he can see it when ‘the struggle’ is faked …
… “I always felt that poetry and song are the ashes of experience, and the ashes were well burned, you could clarify them, you could purify them, you could get rid of the clinkers and chunks, and it could be beautiful fine white ash, which is what a good song is or a good poem, it could blow away in the wind, it could blow right through you: could blow right through your heart…” (Leonard Cohen) …
… (Cohen had few adlibs, and complained of not having sufficient command over the songs on Death of a Ladies Man, the songs that you love so much) …
… On “The Donald” from the last Tribe album, Busta Rhymes repeating Phife’s name as if he was a child tugging at God’s sleeve, failing to land his patois, Busta Rhymes trips cartoonishly into a little pocket (…w-w-wait damn that’s the one part I…) that briefly speeds him out of the beat …
… How that bitch, fuck on Tyler’s “Foreword” starts Flower Boy off with what feels like the intruded-upon end to a saga, and that …fuck… coda carries the feeling of a still-smarting arm …
… The ironic self-conversation living under Earl’s “December 24”: how that scu! paints over the formal appeal for Black English to be legitimized like graffiti …
… How Earl’s ay-aying at the end of “The Mint” morphs into a woozy, wavy maybe…: its arrival on a way out both surprised (listen to the way the word lifts) and the result of a wearying search, through the rambling, insistently swaying middle sound of that word—ay growing to may and being completed by be: the uttering of words especially in repetition becoming a process by which to change them, or leave them changed, or leave them altogether …
… And how Haitian Mach Hommy, on Earl’s beat (“Bride of the Water G-D”) repeats the word well until it travels to ouelle: the word that begins a statement, recollection, testimony, itself becoming uncertain, moving across civilizational boundaries …
… And the pre-vindicated certainty of Benny the Butcher’s every king will be crowned on “Crowns for Kings,” that trust me an extra nod to the almost inherently revolutionary premise that kings are not crown-holders but crown-earners, crowned not by automatic virtue of their status but by their gifts becoming established in reality …
… And then you saw Haiti Babii’s versatile, volatile adlib freestyle that stunned the radio hosts—as it should have, given that Babii was channeling things whose sources couldn’t be understood easily: he was undergoing spasms and accessing areas that mixed the animal and the human …
… You laughed at the manic abruptness, but you know what it’s like being alone, when what comes out of your mouth and happens from your gestures is intimate even as you surprise yourself— even as it becomes alien to you—like your own secretions. Babii made it palpable that communication removes the animal from language—and adlibs restore it …
… (Just before his verse, Babii said one of his goals was to “show you that wolf”—“that” there being non-particular, implicitly archetypal, even as he pointed to it with that word) …
… You acknowledge that he called him- self Haiti despite ‘never’ having been there: “I looked into myself, I researched into my family and I found out I was Haitian, and so I put that cape on my back.” You feel that adlibs are like calls across every boundary—they resonate between and across lives, deaths, systems of comprehension …
… You sense that animals and people have made the same shapes with their mouths without thinking of how many others have made the same. There were words (hi, a sound that acts like a word— became a word) the repetition of which created its own flow …
… “I don’t even need to rap no more, I can just use my adlibs,” he announced towards the end, rolling imaginary dice. (And if verses are dice-rolls padded out with the safety of form, adlibs are sudden gambles—) …
… —And back to the hosts: “I’m at a loss for words,” DJ Hed said, “you used them all” (or he did away with the argument that not using words is any sort of loss…); “I don’t know if that was a séance or a freestyle,” said Bootleg Kev (or he made the distinction immaterial…) Babii transferred something to them, he shifted them into something new. “I don’t want to write nothing,” he explained: “I want to keep it authentic, original, all over the place, so people can learn: Keep their mind free, free your thought, free your mind…” …
… If verses are experiences processed over time and prepared with a view to performance, adlibs document a precise condition at the time of recording, even if they chart areas of feeling that the artist is connected to impersonally, mysteriously, in a way so deep rooted, or non-rooted, that it can only be revealed through spontaneous emergence. They are not extrapolable into other strategies of language …
… And they move from the private part of an artist to the private part of the listener. It is impossible for you to imagine certain verses without their adlibs—they immerse and renew your place in relation to them—and suspend the verse from certainty, as if you still don’t know what will be said afterward, and you’re back to the precise place in the beat where …
… (You acknowledge this as you contemplate the sum total of all the things you have felt and thought and said and not said—what remains unresolved in life, and what doesn’t allow itself to be used by language, and is not absorbed into human time) …
… And you expand outward again, to all those affirmatives—those Yeahs and Yos—with their common affirmative point, and all the sounds come together in your mind—the human and animal sound of the voice seeking to leave language—in order to not mean many different things, but to offer a way out of meaning: …
… To pure feeling.