Reading Seal’s music

Separating strands of popular culture, that is, the popular from culture, or what we take to be significant, usually implies that we have found or discovered what is actually culture, as though what is popular has been allowed to pass and only the diamonds remain from the dross.

In this sense, commenting on popular culture is liberating because one can speculate only on those areas of popular art that are, in a sense, aphoristic (i.e., which “ring true”) thus avoiding the sort of embarrassing critical reach one expects when suggesting that what Seal says or does in one way, in a one video, has bearing on how or what he sings in another video (or song).

Perhaps it does; cases are made and have to be made all the time. But the apriori search for thematic unity and wholes does not simply make aesthetic claims about popular art all too tenuous. Rather, the need for such wholes when talking about art usually directs the esthetician elsewhere, so that the courage needed to make what might be tenuous claims about a popular work of art is abandoned before it begins, as though because it is a known fact that no serious aesthetic unity could exist between, say, a music video, and a song, and its lyrics—aesthetic comment is misplaced here, hence better placed there, around and about more prestigious objects (like, say, Shakespeare).

Perhaps it is dangerous to elide wholes for particulars—particularly when aesthetic commentary, for all its emphasis on wholes, is now awash in specialized commentary. Focusing on just the lyrics of a song, or just the music, or just the video, then, doesn’t seem to be too far off the radar screen, so even if we are asked to comment on the whole, we can simply assert our area of expertise and leave the rest to other disciplinarians.

Yet what I want to say is that such commentary, the commentary I will take up here in discussing Seal’s track “Crazy” is an effective antidote to specialized commentary, and is the sort that seeks to open up the “penetralium” of experience precisely by focusing on the particular and avoiding the general and not because I have no interest in the general but because I often find that discussions in search of the general from the outset elide the particular. (One could say, experience is all too easily elided.) It is only via the particular (i.e., via our particular experience of the world or a text) that we can begin to have any business commenting on the general anyhow. Nor is the trajectory guaranteed. Armed with good intentions, one simply tries it out.

I’ll begin by saying what I think the song isn’t about. The song is not about a crazy person, though the line that certain people are walking through Seal’s head, one with a gun “to shoot the other one” seems to suggest otherwise—conjuring up all sorts of post-facto images of Columbine and the trenchcoat mafia.  Even if Seal couldn’t possibly be alluding to these specific incidents, certainly school shootings weren’t foreign to him or his experience of the world, growing up as he did in Central London. So while such a reading wouldn’t of itself be crazy, I don’t believe the song is out to say that such people are crazy. No doubt they are. Why say it?

Alanis Morissette, who composed a fine cover of the song, capturing and emphasizing its subtlety and pace, undermined her notable musical efforts by presenting a rather cheesy version of what she (apparently) takes “crazy” to mean in her video. Impersonating a “crazy” ex as she does, one who takes it upon herself to act crazy in a world of desire (i.e. relationships) gone haywire seems to imply that going “crazy” is what we all need to do on occasion to keep our sanity, so that Seal’s song becomes a reminder of this fact. I don’t think the song denies any of this; but it certainly does not take pains to spell out such a trite moral stance.

So what about when he says “But we’re never gonna survive unless we are a little crazy”? Yet the line with the greatest semantic weight is not the “But we’re never gonna survive“ line but the alternate chorus line which goes “In a sky full of people only some want to fly isn’t that crazy?” the one Seal repeats in another track, this one his own cover of a Steve Miller song (“Fly like an Eagle”). What I hear in the particular anguish expressed in this line is a plea for understanding or knowledge of the world while acknowledging, at the same time, that such knowledge is impossible to attain in this world. (This is not the first time Seal expresses such anguish, nor the last.)

If a plea for knowledge, then what does Seal not know? And what does he acknowledge he can’t know? Let’s begin by asking ourselves from what vantage point Seal is singing. He starts off, clearly, in the third person: “In a church, by the face, he talks about the people going under,” which is followed by a first-person injunction (to an “only child”) and then: “A man decides after seventy years, that what he goes there for, is to unlock the door.”

So what we are left to believe is that a man has decided to go to church, after seventy years, and as such, warns those just at the exterior of the church (its façade or face), i.e., those coming into the church, of those, seemingly, within the church, going under, which sounds a bit morbid, as though the only reason this man has avoided going to church all these years is to avoid his own mortality, hence cannot stop talking about the people going under.

But none of this serves to explain the song’s next bit which is that he goes there to unlock doors, a needlessly cryptic line perhaps, or one which somewhat inelegantly explains or equates the facing of death with the unlocking of a door. But if this is the case, then why should those around him criticize and sleep? Unless the man in question was a hustler or pusher, of drugs perhaps, so that when he stands by the face and talks about people “going under” he is talking about people going under the influence—that is, of drugs.

What follows is a long modifier and eventual introduction of the first person into the narrative of the song: “And through a fractal on a breaking wall, I see you my friend and touch your face again.” That these two have managed to meet, first person and third person, across whatever intervals of time and space, occurs only through or because of drugs so that the miracle of their meeting happens not in any earthly, mortal setting but in some other higher, metaphysical otherworld accessible only because both have been put under.

(I don’t want to make too much either of the image of a fractal, nor the strange notion of what it would mean to look through one except to note that in analyzing fractals, one must certainly look to find patterns of similarity among geometric patterns otherwise infinitely differentiable so that juxtaposing “a man decides” against “Amanda decides” and “seventy” with “seventeen” are only as compelling as comparisons and points of intersection as we wish to make them. Is this a verbal fractal? Perhaps there is no significant pattern here (and I am, despite my earlier warning, reaching) and we are free to ignore what is right before our eyes (and/or ears). Does a “fractal” have aesthetic value? Certainly words do.)

So what Seal doesn’t know is why it took this man seventy years. Nor is the answer that he was simply too afraid to try drugs and further that drugs are the key to salvation. The point is that whatever method you choose to achieve salvation, such methods don’t come “naturally” and if this is true, why aren’t more people doing more to ensure that they do or, failing that, posing questions of and making demands on their own versions of reality. If nature does not make this easy to do, to achieve salvation, who wouldn’t try drugs in the name of achieving it?

So the answer to the second question – what does Seal acknowledge he cannot know? – comes, to my mind, in another track, one where he beautifully and wrenchingly registers the angst of such unknowing, appealing to “peace as our one salvation.” I’m talking about “Dreaming in Metaphors.”

Drugs are apparent in this song as well, though in a more definitive negative register, as those who have lost faith “turn to the needle” and “back to the cradle” which doesn’t mean that drugs somehow infantilize its users as much as it returns them to a state where they are “cradled”—an existence not necessarily vulgar but one certainly not fractured and, further, one which perpetually “stays the same.” We usually equate drug use (the vulgar kind) with wild ups and downs (“highs” and lows) but what Seal is saying is that the drug in question here, via the needle – the mention of which elicits rather dramatic and sinister sounding chords – acts more to soothe and lull us into a state of conformity. Everyone is on drugs (the bad kind); to break the spell, one must then tamper or risk engagement with the good kind.

Yet to ask why we dream in metaphors is an inquiry with as much potential for devastation as asking why we speak in metaphors, or why we speak at all. What would it take for miracles to happen “as we speak” rather than “as we trip”? It would require us all being awake to our speech, simultaneously, so that if the spell or lull that comes over us over the course of our use of language with one another requires a drug to break it, then only if “all were there when we first took that pill” – that is, together – could we ever hope to make our dreaming life become our waking life because only in the former (not the latter) do we find ourselves truly awake.

I’ll return to the discussion of the supposed “Jonesboro” boys, those walking through Seal’s head, one with a gun “to shoot the other one.” Certainly it is feasible that Seal is reminiscing or recounting the horror of some school shooting, hence why these people are “walking through” his head. Yet it is also equally possible that Seal is not reminiscing but conjuring—that is, imagining a scenario that has yet to play out which means that he is once again conflating first and third person points of view. He is taking up the slack of a first person narrator by inventing or telling a story at this particular instance (one that has yet to come into being, is on the verge of happening: “one of them has got a gun” (present tense)) and also recounting a story that may have happened already (third person narratives often rely on the past tense: “Yet together they were friends at school”).

The Jonesboro reading ultimately fails not simply because we are never told that a shooting actually happens (though there may be reason to infer that it does, as Seal ends the tale with an “Oh no!” followed by an “If [only]” suggesting something bad has indeed taken place), but also because we don’t know that the shooting, if it happens, happens as school. They were only friends at school. They may have both left at this point. So we have no reason to suppose either one “crazy” outside of the fact that one has a gun pointed at the other.

Yet intent is not crazy; pulling the trigger might be but Seal takes great care not to victimize his characters but to present them to us with the outcome of their interaction in question, hence as radically, spiritually, free. By showing us what is in his mind, what potentials exist out there not for violence, but for healing, what Seal is asking us to do is to take up arms to heal rather than lash out, which means that such tragedies, so preventable if only people were awake to them, are not liable to make us crazy like the characters in question (if only we risk seeing), but rather, demand that we make ourselves crazy enough to save them. Most of us won’t have the courage or temerity or foresight or care to make the business of other crazies any of our business; hence Seal can only ask, incredulously, why

In a sky full of people
Only some want to fly
Isn’t that crazy?

Hence the reason I call this bit his true refrain, especially when, upon repetition, he reiterates first “sky” (full of people), then “world” (full of people), then “heaven” (of people). This neat assimilation of sky/heaven, world and mortals is only one term away (gods (or divinities)) from Heidegger’s fourfold, which gains its particular resonance in damning human beings to exist in a dangerous nexus in which dreams are impossible to distinguish definitively from reality, and language from metaphors.

That Seal earlier mentions his “head,” i.e., the people walking through it, who have yet to come into being, making up that which he dreams, though that which is reality precisely because it is not his waking life, implies that he has found a place within the cosmos or fourfold or what have you to rest his head, at least momentarily, because this is the only vantage point he cares to comment on or from—a vantage point removed from “reality,” hence subject to the charge, perhaps, of arising from or in a “crazy” person (i.e., himself); but the point is merely that if we aren’t willing to deal with such a charge, to be crazy, we are never going to survive.

Finally, what about the last lines, cut from some versions of the track, but still in this one, where he says:

And then you see things
The size of which you’ve never known before
They’ll break it
Someday

Whatever it is that is to be seen is not the same thing that is to be broken. What is to be broken is the spell, and the charge to “break it” is less a lament that humans are doomed to destroy their monuments than an affirmation that one day – someday, someway – humans will break through to see the things they’ve never known before. At the same time, the plea for knowledge, to know something, is a charge to break whatever it is we have achieved, as though knowledge puts our afforded understanding at risk.  So we have simultaneous readings here—one where Seal is optimistic that we can indeed break the spell, but also, where a pessimism forces him to conclude that our will to knowledge risks breaking however or whatever we have come to break in the first place. This simultaneous affirmation of hope and despair dissolves any claim to pop-naiveté and assures the integrity of Seal’s sublime message: to yield to otherworldly forces, to break the spell of reality, is not an eternal achievement but one which requires eternal vigilance—the continual spiritual desire to destroy and then rebuild our monuments.

Lastly, where Seal grafts certain segments of this track onto another track (“Fly Like an Eagle”—mentioned earlier), he also conflates certain segments of this track with another, the recognition of which takes us deeper into Seal’s conceptual universe and forces us to begin to flirt with the idea that Seal has indeed achieved, that is, crossed, some sort of aesthetic Rubicon where the entirety of the outer world is alive not only in his mind, but in his expression of it through song. One cannot make such a claim too hastily of course, but at this point, the die is cast—though it may take many more discussions of many more tracks and albums to flesh out the veracity of such a claim.

But let’s look at some lines from “Future Love Paradise,” another track where drugs are invoked, in a (perhaps maddeningly?) positive light:

They’ll make you feel surely
Like you’ve never felt before

The exasperating syntax of this track means that drugs could be the last thing Seal is referring to here, but set against the concluding lines of “Crazy,” we have “feelings” set off against “knowledge,” something we have not “known” before against something we have never “felt” before. The renegade optimism of “Future Love Paradise,” which appears later in the track listing of Seal’s first eponymous album, means that in a world of feelings, utopia, a paradise, is possible, whereas in a world tinged by (the desire for) knowledge, the best we can do is commit to a type of craziness that leaves utopia just beyond our reach, dreaming of it without ever achieving it, which makes the need to save ourselves both greater and the desire to renege on the opportunity more understandable.  Who would save a doomed planet?—that is, who would work to decode metaphors in the first place?—when whatever we are left with is destined, truly, to be lost. That such an endeavour is necessary is crazy; that so few are willing to do it even crazier.

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