Submit to Chaos
Camila, Carti, Cam, Chaos, Confusion
By now, El Guincho is probably more known for his production work in the pop sphere than any of his solo material, which was densely layered, often tropical and psychedelic. Gone are the days when you could go see him hit a wooden block over triggered samples at Union Pool. Here are the days where he is producing bangers for Camila Cabello that people can’t decide if they like or not.
If you’re on the internet (and I know you’re on the internet) then maybe you’ve seen some of the confused discussion around Cabello’s new single “I LUV IT” with Playboi Carti. It’s produced by El Guincho, interpolates and speeds up Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” and features a Playboi Carti verse that devolves into the kind of appealing mumbling that sounds like he was trying to get a sense of the beat and then forgot to finish filling in his lyrics. It sounds unfinished, the same way that Uzi’s “Just Wanna Rock” works because it was clearly tossed off before it could become over-considered and more boring for it.
A lot of the criticism I’ve seen of “I LUV IT” has boiled down to:
This song sounds like Camila Cabello is trying to be someone else
This song makes no narrative sense
Is Carti trolling Camila? Is Camila trolling Carti?
This song is bad. Wait it’s good. But maybe it’s bad?
Each of these points/questions/whatevers are valid, but also none of them really matter. And they don’t matter because songs do not need to uphold the same internal logic as a blockbuster film. They can be absurd. They can be funny. You can sit there wondering what the point was ad infinitum, but to get too deep into the point is to, well, miss the point. At least in this case.
The fourth point, though, is a distillation of the back-and-forth I saw people go through in the last few weeks, or since whenever a snippet of the video first appeared online. It’s worth sitting with.
Here’s a story: In the ancient times of the internet, a lot of rap fans truly, genuinely did not know how to react to Cam’ron and Dipset’s rise. Cam’ron was plainly operating a superior technical level, but it seemed like he’d surrounded himself with guys who were only able to embody individual characteristics that he already had well-represented: Jim Jones was funny like Cam, but at the beginning he couldn’t really rap (someday I’ll write about how Jim Jones has carved out a nice Rick Ross-sized lane for himself, but people aren’t really paying attention). Juelz Santana was good at rhyming words with the same exact words, but lacked the subtlety of a good Cam’ron punchline. All the other guys had their strengths and weaknesses, too—that’s not really the point. The point is that Cam and Dipset made a lot of music, and most of it was loud and confusing and sounded like maybe you were listening to three or four or ten things at the same time. In other words, it sounded like post-9/11 New York. It sounded like the turn of the century. It sounded like the end of the world. Whatever. A lot of Dipset haters got quiet after awhile.
You could boil it down to a single statement—they saw the vision—or you could take it for what it really was: Dipset’s detractors learned to listened to the whole song. It wasn’t about one dude’s clunky verse, or the over the top bombast of a Heatmakerz beat, it was all of it working in tandem to create something bigger, more complicated, and also usually pretty compellingly fucked up.
I know, I know, it’s not very revelatory to say that you have to pay attention to all of a song instead of just the person making noises with their mouth, but when it comes to popular music, we frequently boil it down to the perceived identity/intention of the listed artist. There are many parts of, say, a Beyonce song not made by Beyonce, but we talk about her music as if it emerged fully formed from her and her alone. It’s easier to construct narratives and therefore easier to relate to someone we don’t know.
But back to “I LUV IT.” It’s saying nothing. The video is compelling but, as far as I can tell, divorced from a narrative that in any way connects to the song itself. It takes a bunch of big swings and sounds sort of half-assed. It’s euphoric and giddy and confident and wistful and kind of sad. It’s a lot more experimental than a lot of other pop music right now. It’s great.
In other news: I’ve been revisiting the 2005 Six Organs of Admittance album School of the Flower, and more specifically the album’s title track which is built on an acoustic guitar loop that gets buried by chaotically beautiful drumming from Chris Corsano and a trebly guitar solo that sounds like it’s being piped through your dad’s AM radio.
I normally gravitate toward the corner of the Six Organs oeuvre that is more influenced by Fahey (that’s my way of getting around saying that I like the earlier stuff better, which is what I am actually saying, but I don’t want to be that guy), but this level of structural experimentation, of building and tearing down repetition is hitting hard for me right now. This came out in 2005. That was almost 20 years ago. 20 years! 20 years.