Deep Voices #34
15 songs about longing
Deep Voices #34 on Apple Music
This isn’t quite the dictionary definition of the word, but the way I think about longing is as a sort of inverse of desire. Desire is wanting to feel good. Longing is wanting to not feel bad. In trying to articulate the particularly strange year we’ve had, that is generally the word that I feel most encompasses the wide range of emotions that go into my own experience of the world’s collective isolation.
As I’ve said here before, I get relief from music that mirrors my state, which means this year I’ve been listening to a lot of mopey bullshit. I think these songs are a little different though. The thing about longing is that it’s still an action. Sadness is being stuck in the quicksand. Longing is wanting to get out. In some of the music on this week’s playlist that feeling is expressed through lyrics, in others music, in some both. That there’s not too much connection in style between songs here shows me this is a pretty universal feeling. I’ve outlined below where I find it in some of this week’s tracks.
Playlist notes:
Echo is a key element in longing songs. The shape of an echo, I think, is flat and long, like it’s trying its best to reach from within you across an impassable chasm to the side of the universe where normal people are doing their thing. In a guitar, like on Loren Connors’ beautiful “‘Don’t Leave,’” that comes across as the notes breaking apart. He holds a tone here and there, but mostly jumps around, like he’s looking for an escape route. “End in Blue,” the collaboration between the Bug and Dis Fig doubles down on this idea, the echo sandblasting the song into fragments. Claire Jensen’s cello piece “Final” works the opposite way, like she was given all the shrapnel and assembled into something living.
Most of these songs are about the long game of pain, but “I Hate Danger,” a Bikini Kill B-side, is a tragedy told in miniature. Sung by their drummer Tobi Vail, it’s a story of being ignored and wanting to disappear, so she stages a silent protest. It sets up this great dichotomy of disappointment where the guy is either a jerk or he’s stupid.
The Trinikas’ “Remember Me” and Barbara Mason’s “Don’t I Ever Cross Your Mind” are two interesting songs to me because their needs are so small. Both are directed to exes (though they could just as easily be parents singing to children), asking simply for recognition. They don’t want reconciliation. They’re not asking to be championed. They just don’t want to be forgotten. It’s sad they have to ask but powerful that they actually do.
On “Promises,” Wiki talks about his grandmothers, his New York childhood, and his career as a young rapper in the trio Ratking. Pretty standard biographical stuff, until he starts to sprinkle in small nuggets of regret about oblivious years and substance consumption. And then at the end he says, simply, “I don’t wanna be the neighborhood drunk.” At the end of a punchy origin story, that line really struck me. It’s not about desire, but aspiration inverted, success by avoidance. It’s a gutsy thing to realize and a harder one to admit.
In 2004, some years before he joined the cast of “Love and Hip Hop,” Lil Scrappy released a song called “Be Real” featuring a wheezing guitar and a haunting verse by a rapper named Bohagon. With a squeaky voice and a hearty drawl, Bohagon narrates a harsh portrait of his childhood, his few lines crafting a vivid story. “They’ll kill you over thirty dollars,” he raps. “I seen a man cut with a dirty bottle/Blood squirted on his shirt and collar/I heard him holler a sound that I can't forget/Ran home, watched cartoons, and ain’t said shit.”
An Atlanta mainstay in the 2000s, Bohagon worked with Lil Jon, and you can hear his pensive tone sound deeply out of place on party tracks like “Get Crunk.” Despite a somewhat misguided attempt at mainstream attention through boisterousness, I followed his career closely and somehow in 2006 I made it to track 27 of his mixtape The Power Move, “Take It Away.” The premise of the song is not unlike Wiki’s “Promises,” a sweeping autobiographical rap narrative. The song is rapped in a sing-song cadence. At times, the rhyming is almost Seussian, as is the morale. “They say I’d never be shit, chasing after dreams I’ll never get...I rep for the underdog and let them know off the top that Bohagon’s one of ya’ll.” But after setting up these dreams, they get railroaded by reality. He likens being signed to his record label to being stuck in quicksand and pleads with them to release his album, both so he can be an artist and so his kids can eat. What gets me about the song isn’t only that plea, but how he acknowledges it’s probably not going to happen. And he was right. He released a few mixtapes, guested on some interesting tracks (like this Gil Scott-Heron sampling Playboy Tre song), but the album was never released.
It’s sad to listen to any unheard plea, but especially so by someone so talented. He’s not asking for undue praise, only the opportunity for his work to be able to be judged on its merits. Knowing that didn’t happen, the song becomes a bummer of a historical document, not marker of time in the waiting room before the success he wanted and deserved. Unfortunately, part of the reason the song is so good is that you can really feel his hopelessness. He knew things weren’t going to work out and then they didn’t.