hip-hop music and culture || soundtrack

SoundtrackAuthor(s): Gregory PardloSource: Callaloo, Vol. 29, No. 3, Hip-Hop Music and Culture (Summer, 2006), pp. 718-724Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488340 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 20:12

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCallaloo.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.147 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 20:12:56 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4488340?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


SOUNDTRACK

by Gregory Pardlo

3:36

Harvey, your car stereo left rhythm's tinnitus patting my head, a diaphanous afro, as I gathered steam in the glancing shafts of sad and angry light playing about the purblind alley the idling cruiser's fingers drumming alike each wall, uniform and alleged offender. An empty lot jagged with the fallout of forties targeted along the brick glimpsed the familiar rodeo of arrest. A plastic bag threshed snagged on a twigged umbrella. I was momentarily immersed in those resinous moments in a way I still recall sharp as the pine trees from the carwash, as if I could set a needle on the ridge between them-not the pine trees, Harvey, but that vinyl fermata between memories, lower my eyelids like a dust cover and let it play. This is where I begin again in this wasted province before rowhouses whose dooryards are the street. A block whited like covered wagons out the verge. A block

away, your stereo continues to train coins of car-

flung beats astride my heels' hollow drops along the shoveled walk. Still I'm searching for excuses to celebrate you. Still searching for the source of the impulse to celebrate. Yet I loved not you but your attentions thus I sing myself. And how know the man but for his rhythms? Your music would make me authentic. So goes the rhythm so goes the nation. Miss Jackson notwithstanding.

2:48 Your music would make me authentic. Each bass beat shadowed by trill richter I can still hear the car

body chattering as if it were hitting the rumble strips approaching a toll. Still its absent pulse jacks the fish seat of the brain where the body is taken in tow like a Viking burial: police lights lob small

Callaloo 29.3 (2006) 718-724



CALLALOO

comets at my feet the ground littered with ziplock dimebags and the origami boxes of General Tso. I sigh submission to the tide my shoes sniffling pebbled ice and snow. I can't help but keep step with the music. I'm hard wired for the groove and am the groove the beat absent

mindedly. Harvey, I am the only address I can reach you: both call and response you slow the surface of my voice until it casts only reflections. Like my image in the tinted window of a parked car reducing to yet another prior self, the pre-teen of me nested like a Russian doll inside this memory, holding the shoulder-strapped recorder with creaking spools I once when innocent sang I Wanna Get Next To You into as if

packing a little suitcase, working the catches-the words like shoes too big to fill I pushed them around the cassette barely knowing what they want, singing them like someone's name I didn't know

4:43 I'd gotten wrong. What escapes, the present it loses sequence as I slip the cuffs the stir-crazed drama of moments filled with contingency. Music in the bones they say. In fairness it is not that the goldfish experiences memory loss, born to each moment anew, but that the goldfish is aware of time no more than it is aware of water. I know these things. I once wore black canvass shoes with transparent soles the color of goldfish when I hit house parties with you in 8th

grade. It hurts me to recall. But there it is: Shame

leaning against the closet door each morning whistling tunes of limitation and regret. Still I live for days when the metaphorical knotted string on my finger goes absent as the glasses lost on my grandfather's forehead and the earth bears me in a personal surf where the ground moves like an airport walkway and there could be a camera on a dolly leading me as sounds of the town meeting melodies in my head drown out the voice-over maundering evening's self-conscious intentions. I'd play the street life like a ouija board, the dynamic landscape shuttling the fragmented aural text of our past lives

together. Soundtrack a presence pervasive as to conceal itself; native and alien

719



CALLALOO:

Soundtrack a vanishing point like Aum. Soundtrack a way of sensing the me that hears me thinking when I'm thinking ribbons of sound

2:18 adorn ash trees and poplars knuckling storm clouds dragged in a low front. Distant sirens and the whining muffler of your tricked out coupe, exhaust pinched like the pitched raspberry of a deflating balloon. You said time

drags through winter because we slow in our orbit of the sun days like music from a departing car. But Harvey, nothing changes when you're in the car. True that, you say, but nobody's in the car there is no car.

Perspective drawing caused a revolution by arresting the viewer at an unnatural point in reference to some horizon, you say, but what happens when the horizon swells? What if the surface was fluid like a river and you was in it and the experience had no way of reflecting on itself? Do fish notice tides change? I would think so, Harvey, my ears pop in midtown elevators.

My neighborhood once felt immense as a foreign language. Now familiar, it is brief as a song. Soundtrack, you've said, is utter interiority, air bubble in a field of attention otherwise tied to the rails of memory and presentiment. (No, he didn't use those words. But would it really have skipped your needle, reader, if he had?) Air bubbles blown in the public pool having hopped the fence after curfew. Sing it: Who could

Davy Jones the longest our lean bodies bent like mollusks twinned in the concrete amnion of water bleaching color from our shorts? Who could stave off the event horizon looming inches from our heads like a silver-

paper ceiling longest? Present never was. Soundtrack a fugue state. Soundtrack a rope-a-dope. Think of the river a chorus of currents and time signatures, I say. In the discourse of reason we line currents up like straws so

they appear equal. This way we can see what happened, a gather of objects, the funereal art, but what's hidden is the way events were felt.

1:37 Harvey, you warned the difference between soul and no- soul is how one follows the beat. No-soul claps on one

720



CALLALOO:

and three. Soul takes two and four. It skips my needle to think of people as haves and have-nots, to think one's

everlasting hinges on a type of scansion. But there it is. It don't mean a thing... Music and dance mean the same thing a unity of supposition. Suppose, for instance, our taste for

harmony is just a groping after patterns. Rapture of ten million monkeys tattooing the keys of their

typewriters symphonically like the cast of Stomp. Must I organize life according to an alphabet of clicks and grunts? What use is an anniversary? What makes the sentence a complete thought and why would anyone want one? A tune mists a window above with the drawn and melismatic bath of soul music.

Barking rises like an elm from a distant

yard to punctuate the beat which, having recognized the tune, seems to me louder. Soundtrack a transaction. Coin in a border territory. Like one day in seven

you return to me. I wish this were not so. I should not have to know you as what I speak out of me. Harvey. My inner life emancipated matrushka dolls we exist in the relation we spiral out of each other like the street performing brothers center

stage of a boom box in Washington Square.

1:24

Harvey, I like you with your paunch-too-soon. You're a quiet guy. A don't-start-none kind of guy when you're sober. In the car, you pointed out the convention in Spike Lee films where he shoots actors from the waist up as they "walk" without moving their bodies. The actors ride the same dolly the camera does. The background- treetops and rooftops-recedes from the camera's perspective while the old friends chat unchanged, static, fixed in our field of vision but for their gestures of conversation, suggesting a

peacefulness that comes with submission to nature's rhythm, omnipresent soundtrack sealing them safely away from the narrative's hazards. To know a moment, you said, we must know how that moment's natives appraised the weight of its future. Was it slouched toward? feared? tedious as a month of Sundays? Lunar or saturnine in its gravity? You told me Richard Wright says the African's sense of time "oscillated

721



CALLALOO:

between the present and the past." It's as if their future is always here, always a part of being, you said. Somewhere inside you must nest an essential circular self, Harvey ... which would be obvious to anyone who has ever expected you to make an appointment.

2:12 As you spoke I wondered if you saw my lips were moving, anticipating the shape of each word before it came to you. I know that annoys you, Harvey, but it shows I'm listening. With my lips, my tongue and my teeth, I beat my thoughts into syllables: talking drum. Beat box. I make the music with

my mouth. Consider all the melodic options, the available scales of intonation and yet no language flourishes without some syncopation and as a result we

perceive perception as chunkified and break- down-able bits of info affixed in infinite combinations: the phonetic alphabet a technology patterned like the primary colored universe of Lego blocks. The calendar. The work of

Joseph Cornell. I am Germanic grammar cause I think Germanic grammar where the subject is a constellation of modifiers and articles boxcarring the way Beethoven described his creative process: pieces of song "flying in to attach themselves." But think of Pound who, instead of linguistic valences, sought a twinning in the offing of the East. Pound sought nebulae, Pound sought Playdough. He knew Brancusi. He sought Soundtrack.

Money, ain't shit about you dramatic.

Germanic.

Money, ain't shit about you germanic.

Ach, du. Harvey. You cool as the piece under your seat that interrupted me once when it whispered into memory that moment we'd never share. I thank you for your sixth sense and your soul-shake that sent me out of the car before the street got hot. I had no idea, no past record and you didn't want to break my luck. Good looking out.

722



CALLALOO0

1:30

Memory advances jaggedly with fits and fissures while language modulates and hums because it has to keep making sense the only revolution happening when it splinters into jargons and jive forms more formal than the loans and alterations of slang for this is all slang is: a pidgin valving surfaces between fishbowls.

But it's all pidgin, you say.

True that. But we wanted to stand before that connection unmediated. To unbecome the process that became us.

We called it Soundtrack barely knowing what it wants. We called it Soundtrack hoping to get ahead of time. We worked hard at being cool because we'd mis- defined cool as a kind of concentration, an ability to affect the future as it occurs. Of course, this only made us corny.

4:53 At least me, Harvey. Although in high school, you were the A / V guy wheeling carts through the halls like groceries. But I won't speak on that. I'm just saying. And I'll leave alone the wear on your pate-too-soon: male pattern: from the French patron, to mock the father. And aren't we that very mockery in word and deed doomed to stalk the paths they wore to ruts? Soundtrack delivers the individual from an inherited sense of time and self-worth, in tune, rather, with the existential swim. Delivers the individual from the compulsory chronographies of retail sales and telemarketing and the car wash we worked the summer I first dropped out of college where I felt the condescension of the BMW driver, my brown face footballed in his new-polished chrome. I would imagine hearing Ms. Levertov, from her introduction to Baca's MartOn, monotoning like the disembodied voice of Obi Wan, "next time you see such a figure, remember it is very possible he is living an inner life at least as vivid as your own." And I'd wonder if she were speaking to me or the driver. And my did we dance that summer. According to the liner notes, Car Wash "may have been the first motion picture ever developed entirely around the talents of a music producer."

723



CALLALOO

Imagine a vision preceded by the sound of that vision. Soundtrack. "Norman Whitfield, the legendary Motown producer" was that sound. Surely, he clapped on two and four.

3:47 It's our anniversary, Harvey. On this day in 1996 we fought like brothers in the street. On this date it is 1996 and I am tending bar. I am on my job, Harvey. On this day for years now I am on my job ducking for the ever last your drunken fisticuffs. Because my grandfather owns the bar you want to drink for free. But I'm sorry, Harvey. In this case

you must pay like the others. I have to draw a line, make a distinction. You hate that, I know. And I'm sorry I called you Falstaff. I'm a prick. But the truth is

doing the same thing it used to do and the calendar only grids regret. It doesn't come back, Harvey, and now you're gone somewhere Southwest where you went to get back some form of innocence, folly of follies, to start over, where they tell me you instead got lost to a crank habit in a dirty room. I imagine you wearing a pattern in the carpet singing your mother's church book like a slave at the wheel, your habit

claiming you frozen over. They say some fish lay five hundred thousand eggs and eat many of them. Some survive, Harvey. Some dance in the sunlight strobed off winded water and others do something that approximates dancing beside the snack table in Tamika's mom's living room. We lived them together. The river come to this. Sound of the frozen river sleep shrugging crusts ashore like a floored duvet.

724



hip-hop music and culture || soundtrack

Documents