The first time I read James Baldwin’s A fire Next Time I read it all in one day while on break from my shit-pay-super-busy restaurant cook job. It was an extra day off because me and the sous chef had held it down while a bunch of people were out sick or something. I don’t remember. I remember that I said to myself “girl, it’s okay if you lay in bed all fucking day, you are going to just chill, read this book and listen to all of these CDs you got in the mail.” And that is exactly what I did. I listened to Isis and Oxbow while reading Baldwin, looking out over the street and the ridge line behind my apartment. Looking at how the light plays with the clouds. It was a sparkful day. In the middle I took a nap to a Merzbow album. I drifted off to the the grinding noise of machine feedback and awoke as it all coalesced and ceased into silence.
This is all just to say that there is art which creates beautiful, distinct memories around it. Certain things jump into our personal, and collective, zeitgeist. The album before last by The Michael Character, Oh, Shoot!, took over my morning routine for a while. It gave me hope and a sense of urgency and ardency in the face of the dehumanizing forces of the profit motivated, hierarchal, economy which defines most every aspect of our existence.
For all the people who have read The Fire Next Time a lot less have read No Name In The Street, Baldwin’s follow up to Fire. I did not read that book in a day. It took me about a month of working my way twenty, ten , or five pages at a time. It was a more brittle book, as Baldwin was wading his way through the deaths of Malcom X and Martin Luther King Junior, and to a certain extent, the death of the civil rights movement. Coming to terms, as it were, with a failure to achieve what Malcom X identified as the dominion of human dignity, not civil rights.
As I heard that The Micheal Character were ramping up to release this album, and I was brought into the fold and given the promo link, I started thinking about the relationship between Fire and No Name as a framework for thinking about Oh Shoot! and the new album. Would Totally Totally be a less shining, more contemplative, response to the things which have occurred since the tumultuous, almost surreal experiences, of early lockdown when Oh Shoot! was released? The historic moment that was the early days of covid in America seemed to almost lift a veil on possibility. And Oh Shoot! Felt like a reminder, as Bruce once sang, “that it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive”.
Totally Totally reminds me of No Name In The Street less because its reflecting on losses and collective tolls, and it does that some, but because of its lack of luster. Like No Name, Totally is dense. The first song “Erik Prince” is an extended reference to the privatized military politics of the global war on terror. One thing I know is that a lot of the references were flying by me like exit signs on a highway. As soon as the album started I had to google who Erik Prince is. I don’t know what making ‘Iran the new Afghanistan’ means.
Sonically the album is lush and warm. More so that Oh Shoot!. There are woodwinds, strings, slide guitars, and pianos all over the record. On my first listen I thought there was a lack of bangers, of songs you’d want to play at high volume and dance around your room to (see ‘The Social Wage’). My repeat listens, though, are giving way to a real fondness for these songs. I don’t know if any of them feel like they stand out in the same way as on Oh Shoot!. Though I do think there is a ‘if you observe it, it will change simply by the act of observing it’ thing going on. I find that when I go into a record knowing I have to write about it, the things I say about it change as I listen more and more, making exact statements about a record hard to pin down.
Still present on this record is the thru-line of looking at the comforts we accrue in the world, because we all want, and deserve, comfort, and how this comfort separates us from the people who are lower than us on the rungs of society. I am poor but I ain’t homeless. I was raised broke but my moms got money now. I have a degree. I read the good books and I talk right and dress right. What, really, is my relationship to oppression, stress, and trauma. Getting the answer to these questions feels essential to moving on with my damn life. But I know I’ll never have them.
This record, in what can only remind me of listening to early career Eminem in my brother's bedroom while playing Xbox as kids, has a lot of skits. Well three. But for a ten track record that is a lot. And one of them, “Eliot Hugh” has a funny voice! A track I always skip. Because I am a humorless bitch. The accompanying piano is marvelous.
In some ways it feels like this album is bursting with too many ideas. Lyrically, and musically. There are noisy moments of synth which are fun and exciting and perhaps add nothing. The references. Oh god so many References. The lyrics come on sometimes like a graduate paper or a leftist zine of ‘talking points’. Album closer “Song For a Project” does the best at bridging the political to the human with a singing melody and a refrain of “you better get more creative real soon”. Fantastic stuff.
The Michael Character, after 15 albums, have a sound, defined by subtle and wild dynamic and tonal shifts. They excel at taking a kind of american songbook pastiche and wringing it out until it's something a lot more raw and a lot more punk. On this record a sudden burst of synthesizer madness creates these moments of shift, on “32” they are deployed to mirror the mental anguish the singer is contending with as they describe their excursion deeper and deeper into the fold of normative middle class hegemony. “Erik Prince” undulates between a kind of mad dash bloom of trilling strummed guitars, twinkling pianos, and beer bottle whining slide guitars and a folk rock strumming stomp. The band, after all this time, is tight. They are perhaps underrated as a great band, being that the lyrics and ideas tend to take center stage. But the music is no joke either. 31 turns up the tempo and gets the tempo up. “Where's all the land back when you need it.” The screaming at the end of that song is scary. Very scary.
“Did I work for all the things I got?/ My high birth and my union job?” Totally Totally revels in its sing song density. The more I listen the more I see that there is luster. And perhaps if I reread No Name I would see that the complexity of the diamond carbon structure of it is not at the sacrifice of gleam.
“I didn’t know anything about Communism, but I knew a lot about slums.” Baldwin writes about his march in a May Day parade, chanting, “East side, West side, all around the town, we want the landlords to tear the slums down.” My love of Baldwin stems, in part, in his ability to find the humanity behind a cloak of cultural diction. Here he spells out that though as a young boy he knew little of theory, he knew a lot about slums. This is an energy The Michael Character has been drilling into record after record. How to build collectively with people, in spite of their desire to man a barricade. The lyrics about the social wage, about Palestine, about moving to the suburbs are in essence an incantation of question and protection. Searching for some way to bring it all together so that everyone gets what they need.
The Michael Character has proven that they release heartfelt and essential records. By the fifth listen through the record started to make sense, to fit together wholly. It's good that a listen through takes a bit less time than to read a book. My critiques still stand though they feel less relevant, after the picture starts to make sense. And now I have spent my Baldwin comparison-for-a-review bullet.
