Poetry Archive

Reggie’s short for Reginald, right?

I posted this video on Sunday. It was recommended to me by my cousin who posted it to my Facebook wall, but that personal detail doesn’t really matter…

I’ve subsequently gone through a number of Reggie Watts’ videos, listened to his interview on the most recent Nerdist (recommend). Exposition in case you’ve never heard of him and you’re too busy or at work or something and can’t watch the above video to get a sense of what Reggie Watts is all about: In music and speech (jokes), he takes pure form (cadence, phrasing, rhythms, etc. associated with different cultures / subcultures / genres), exaggerates and strips them of content, spinning them out in pure improvisation. It’s fucking impressive, and he’s obviously talented something crazy (both as a listener and as a mimic and as a technical vocalist/musician). He seems cut loose from any creative fetters — in a state of total spontaneity.

There’s something about him that bothers me though, and that especially started to bother me when I heard him interviewed and realized that he’s kinda a pretty white-seeming geek hipster (and by “white” I just mean that when he’s not performing, I wasn’t struck by any strong signifiers in the content or form of his voice that might suggest he strongly identified with anything but the dominant culture, but granted that’s assuming a lot) — anyway, he’s miles away in disposition from the ODB/Afroman schtick he’s playing (entertainingly) at in the video. I wonder if he’s really interested in the content of the forms of music he’s mimicking at all. What’s his point? That you can get to total freedom and adulation by stripping away content? What are we supposed to think of these now-stripped-back forms? Is the thrill you feel watching him the thrill of seeing previously lively and powerfully mysterious forms be captured and sterilized?

Reminds me of the Canadian superstar poet, Christian Bök. who sold like a million (>25,000) copies of his carnival-trick of a book wherein each chapter was constrained to containing words that only had one vowel — e.g. “Chapter A” could only contain words like “black Atlanta  lads lack salad bars” (not an actual quote, but diabetes is a big problem especially among southern blacks, at least partially for lack of access to reasonably priced fresh produce — salad bars for all!).

It was obviously a ton of work — I think he said in interviews that he read the dictionary five times (confirmed by Wiki). He’s clearly and extravagantly clever. I “oohed” and even “aahed” a bit when I first read it. But I went cold on it pretty quick in a very similar way to how I’ve just felt my temperature drop re: Watts. And then when I watched a video debate staged between him and poetic arch-conservative, Carmine Starnino (not-so-implicitly situating Bök as the arch-avant gardist), and when he started taking grand moral stances, I was rubbed hard the wrong way. What he’s advocating strikes me as fundamentally a massive plunge into pure abstraction as a way to escape from any real, difficult, substantive engagement with the world itself. He tries to cover this up by lamenting that there isn’t anyone writing “great work” on the moon landing or the microwave — ’cause it’s apparently the ’60s.

It strikes me as fitting that he should be nostalgic for this era. The year before the moon landing, Habermas comprehensively theorized what strikes me as exactly the ideology of science and technology Bök is proselytizing, diagnosing it as the ideology ordering the supposedly “post-ideological” late 20th Century and spelling out exactly why its endpoint is critically exacerbated fragmentation and alienation and catastrophic communicative paralysis (read the essay, ’cause it’s brilliant).

Instead of bread and circuses, we get tools billed as equipping us for our own self-expression (the content of self taken for granted as an a priori) but freed of all the sociological / historical / political contexts that, in fact, gave their inspirations their meaning and power in the first place — the form of R&B sanitized for our use in self-expression (an end in itself); microwaves that’ll free up time for more authentic living (what “authentic living” is defined personally and privately); the letters of others primed for our own re-purposing (no judgement or discussion of what those purposes might be, ’cause that’s our problem — that’s for “I” — but isn’t it cool that I’m using this other dude’s letters? We can agree on that much, right?):

…but as Gil Scott-Heron put it:

…if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.

What’s actually being said in the placard above? Strikes me as not much more than a vague mutual affirmation of the legitimacy of each of Bok’s and Lexier’s “I”s. Playful, but blah. Is there anything in the content of either poem to be learned about the world? That we can re-purpose letters to spell different things? Ever notice that the letters in “banal” can be used to spell “nab Al”? Is there anything to be learned from the poems about them as “you”s? I guess I learned that dude on the left thinks using the same letters makes texts equal. Maybe, but only on the most boring metric in the universe.

So I guess this has all been a complicated way of proposing that we need to think much more seriously about questions like should we really welcome another “innovation” in staging communication without content? Do we really need more ways of avoiding making people confront the “you” or the “we”? Those larger-than-I things out of which we can create larger-than-I meanings or maybe even just a dynamic, engaged “I” (a.k.a., things we might actually no longer have to just fake care about once the fleeting rush of formal novelty wears).

At least Reggie doesn’t take himself too seriously.