An Argument For The Excellence Of Neneh Cherry’s Singing Trouble Man

 Trouble Man 

Marvin Gaye

I come up hard baby, but now I'm cool

I didn't make it sugar, playin' by the rules

I come up hard baby, but now I'm fine

I'm checkin' trouble sugar, movin' down the line

I come up hard baby, but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man, don't get in my way

I come up hard baby, I've been for real, baby

Gonna keep movin', gonna go to town

I come up hard, I come up gettin' down

There's only three things that's for sure

Taxes, death and trouble, oh

This I know, baby, this I know, sugar

Girl, ain't gon' let it sweat me, babe

Got me singin', yeah, yeah

Woo

Come up hard, baby, I had to fight

Took care my business with all my might

I come off har- come-off-hard, I had to win

Then start all over and win again

I come up hard but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man don't get in my way, hey, hey

I know some places and I've seen some faces

I got good connections, they take my directions

What people say, that's okay, they don't bother me, no

I'm ready to make it, don't care what the weather

Don't care 'bout no trouble, got myself together

I feel the kind of protection that's all around me

I come up hard, baby, I've been for real, baby

With the trouble mind, I'm movin', goin' to town

I come up hard, I come up gettin' down

There's only three things for sure

Taxes, death and trouble, oh

This I know, baby, ooh, this I've known, baby

Ain't gon' let it sweat me, baby 

Woo

Oh Lord, baby

Ooh, I've come up hard, but now I'm cool

I didn't make it, baby, playin' by the rules

Come up hard, baby, now I'm fine

I'm checkin' trouble, sugar, hey, movin' down the line, oh

Two different versions:

Trouble Man, Marvin Gaye, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kduvcqx-BU

by Neneh Cherry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PufNx9X-lsc

8/1/22

“My argument to someone for Neneh Cherry’s version as able to stand on the same level of excellence as Marvin Gaye’s:

“ I’m making a different point, if I’m understanding you.

Job cries out in anguish.

This song is also about anguish, Trouble Man, and about dealing with it and struggling to get past it. It’s about the struggle against it, which is rooted in the recognition of what that trouble has been, will be again and always will be. And in that recognition there is pain. 

… I come up hard baby, but that's okay

'Cause Trouble Man, don't get in my way…

…I come up hard, baby, I've been for real, baby

With the trouble mind, I'm movin', goin' to town…

What Neneh Cherry uniquely conveys in her reading is what that anguish is like, that coming up hard, for real, that “trouble mind.”

And she captures effectively too the complicated hope tinged with desperation that troubled man can stay ahead, stay out, of trouble in the sped up part of the song

…I know some places and I've seen some faces

I got good connections, they take my directions

What people say, that's okay, they don't bother me, no

I'm ready to make it, don't care what the weather

Don't care 'bout no trouble, got myself together

I feel the kind of protection that's all around me…

You can hear the hope, hustle, jive and desperation in these lines, which in being sped up quite dramatically convey the need to move quickly to stay ahead of everything that’s trouble and troubling, which will always be chasing him. These lines can’t be seen as separate from the pain of the trouble and its constant potential to inflict itself.

He’s reassuring himself as much as he’s reassuring “baby,” “sugar.”

The tentativeness and impermanence  of his now being cool is evident in his need to keep “movin' down the line, oh.”

So, in sum, it’s the coming up hard, the trouble, what’s been for real, the certainty and inescapable constancy of death, taxes and trouble, the need each time to start all over and fight to win again, his trouble mind, it’s all of that aspect of the song, in tension with his determination to keep beating it all time after time, that she uniquely conveys in her singing with, as I originally said, a Job like resonance.

Or so I argue.”

A Note On The Objection To Saying “Only Women Can Become Pregnant”

 “Only women can get pregnant” is apparently objectionable.

The argument is, to say so denigrates women who’ve transitioned to men, but men who can become pregnant. 

However, does such true transitioning require a vaginectomy and a metoidioplasty?

Why not?

If it does, can’t we say these trans men cannot become pregnant, just as born men who stay men cannot?

Does that meet the objection? 

The argument might be, there are born women who cannot for whatever biological reason become pregnant: does this mean they’re not women?

But doesn’t this argument suffers from logical inversion? 

To say only women can become pregnant is not to say women who can’t become pregnant aren’t women. It’s only to say only women can become pregnant, which is the original proposition under scrutiny.

It logically leaves open the claims that men can fully transition to become women and women can to become men, which both form a different issue.

Here, only the objection to the claim that only women can become pregnant is under scrutiny. 

Season 3, Episode 6, Brit Box’s Silk Finally Completely Jumps The Shark

I’ve been enjoying Silk but it’s jumped the shark in Season 3, Episode 1. 

To boil it down, a schizophrenic kid compelled by voices in his head goes berserk in a “kettle”—UK phrase for cops hemming in a crowd—and pushes a cop hard who falls back and cracks his head on a lamppost and dies.

Defending the kid for manslaughter and finally becoming aware during the trial that he’s compelled by voices in his head, his barrister, Martha Costello:

1. doesn’t tell the court the kid is mentally and that she needs to assert that defence; 

2. she instead continues to defend him on the merits, even though she knows he’s done the deed, chancing the possibility of a guilty verdict; 

3. she does this on the theory that the kid’s worst possible fate is to be found guilty by reason of insanity and then have to spend time in a mental institution: apparently, the possibility of life in prison is a better option;

4. further, she puts theories and suppositions to the jury that she knows are false (as opposed to strictly ensuring the prosecution proves each element of the charge beyond a reasonable doubt;

5.  she makes a ludicrous closing statement to the jury that has little to do with the evidence and more to do with an irrelevant story about another of her cases, the outcome of which she falsifies;

6. her rationale for all this bizarre defence work is “bugger the rules, I’m more than just a lawyer in what I’m doing in court for my client”—my paraphrase.  

Then, of course, the kid is found not guilty on the merits and is reconciled with his father ready to get on with his life as though his insanity had just, poof, disappeared. 

Absurdly disappointing! 

Limerick

There once was a man from Manhattan,

Who always dined with his hat on.

When asked to remove it,

He said to reprove it, 

Off my head it will surely get sat on.

A.E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad XXX And My Attempt At Paraphrasing It Stanza By Stanza

 A Shropshire Lad 30/63    

A.E. Houseman

Others, I am not the first,
Have willed more mischief than they durst:
If in the breathless night I too
Shiver now, ’tis nothing new.

More than I, if truth were told,
Have stood and sweated hot and cold,
And through their reins in ice and fire
Fear contended with desire.

Agued once like me were they,
But I like them shall win my way
Lastly to the bed of mould
Where there’s neither heat nor cold.

But from my grave across my brow
Plays no wind of healing now,
And fire and ice within me fight
Beneath the suffocating night.

——————

My shot at a paraphrase, stanza by stanza:

I’m not the first who desired to stir up things more than I dared to do. If on this windless night I am without breath and shiver, I and others have done so before. It all comes from inside me.

Many more than I, if you want to know the truth, have run cold with fear and hot with desire, as though we were a horse with the reins on us of icy fear and hot desire at war with each other, keeping us hopelessly fixed to a spot from which we can’t move.

As I have this feverish sickness, so have others.  And I like them shall get my way in the end, to where I moulder in the grave where the iciness of fear and the heat of desire don’t exist.

But as for now, the prospect of death quenching fear and desire offers me no breeze of balm or cooling restoration across my fevered forehead. Hot desire and icy fear still clash inside me, as though the windless night itself is smothering me such that I can’t breath.

A Note On Pauline Kael On The Godfather (1)

 So what’s the word on Pauline Kael? 

I just reread her review of, essay on, The Godfather (1.)It’s impressively showy. Her prose is vibrant. There’s breadth to the review. It’s spacious. She knows a lot. It’s popping with her vibrant, verging on the “know it all” sensibility. 

And yet, any yet, with all that said, I read preening. 

The Godfather becomes a subordinate, marshalled in the service of her strutting showy stuff, showing off. 

I can learn more about the movie, its story, the acting, the themes, the goods, the bads, the filmmaking itself by reading less spectacular reviews, ones that put the movie ahead of the reviewer celebrating herself. 

She doesn’t even begin to grapple with the movie’s romanticization of the Don, its sentimentality about the thugs’ life. 

When I actually penetrate all her discursiveness, some insights can be gleamed to be sure, but also too there is plenty to think is off target about the movie. 

I understand she’s held sacred by many but I have to wonder if that sacredness is but a lot of many getting  fooled by the sizzle hot off the Kael griddle.

Analysis Of Fiona Sampson’s Poem, The Lodger

The Lodger

Fiona Sampson 

You could figure it as a trapdoor, 
blur of hinge and 
down 
into the unconscious of this stranger 
moving around your garden like a trap— 
making all the greens unstable 
as the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you. 
Bang to rights 
is how he'd like to have your house. Cuckoo, 
wool-wearing garden-dweller, 
new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley 
and roses. 
Meanwhile, the unaccustomed heat. 
Meanwhile, a sky tunnelling upward— 
sense of proportion—golden section 
of elder hedge; then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.

A more elusive poem than Charles Reznikoff’s, see immediately below.

My analysis:

The poem starts informally, idiomatically, “You could figure it.” So it begins with explaining how the reader could figure; it also begins with the how the speaker thinks about it but generalizes her figuring into how anyone, “you,” could figure it just as she does. The figuring also suggests making poetry of it, figure it, make images of it, so to say, whatever “it” is. 

“it” can be figured and figured out as a trap door. We could fall through it. Quickly or dizzily too, the hinge is a “blur” as we go whizzing or dizzily past it. And we could figure that  we fall into the unconscious of it. This “stranger” is “it.”

So, a couple of enigmas among others:

How is it, the stranger, a trapdoor;

How do we fall into the stranger’s unconscious?

My idea is that it, the stranger, is like a trapdoor for us. Its presence is a shock that entraps/traps/entices us. But into what? Its unconscious? How can that be? Is it that we don’t see what is there: rather, we see what we see is there? In that, a stranger, something external to us, merges in us as we see not what is there as such but rather what we make of it, how we see it, perceiving as informed by all of what we are, what is beneath the surface of us, our unconscious. 

On this basis, falling into “the unconscious of this stranger” is to fall into our own. 

And on this basis, coming upon something strange to us, a stranger, traps us into immediately going inside ourselves to come to sense what it is. It’s a trapdoor to that trapping simply in virtue of what the unbidden “stranger” is to us.

So, it may be that it, the stranger, takes up space in our heads, is lodged there, is a lodger there just as the stranger seems to have lodged itself/himself on our property, taking up space there, indeed unsettling everything. And for yet another us, the stranger is now lodged in our heads as readers, unsettling us as we try to make sense of its presence in the poem.

The conceit of the trap as involving our instantaneous inner then outer journeys continues by those journeys’ result, our apprehension of it trapping the speaker’s garden, which we can figure is our own. As the stranger moves, it seems to us, in our figuring, the garden writhes in his entrapment of it, “making all the greens unstable” with its havoc-causing. So we get “the warble of nausea come bang up to greet you.” “Warble” nicely with onomatopoeia catches the inner sensation of a wave of nausea suddenly afflicting us, inflicting itself inside us, “come bang up to greet you.”

The vernacularity of some of the language, “come bang up,” juxtaposed with some of the more formal language, “the unconscious,” and with some of the poetic language, “blur of hinge,” “the greens unstable,” “warble of nausea” capture conventional everyday us mixed with intellectual, learned us, and mixed with the figuring us, all remaking reality. 

The nausea that comes “bang to greet you” is of a piece with figuring gone wild. For we might imagine that the stranger, now a he, “bang to rights,” would like to have our house.

“bang to rights” is suggestive. We imagine he assumes it’s his complete right to take what we principally own, our house, just as he seems to us to have lodged himself in our garden. 

But also “bang to rights” might suggest our uneasiness, perhaps guilt, over we what we as haves have and what the stranger as a have not has not.

After all, we come to see him, as “cuckoo” in a ragged wool coat of some kind, worn, it turns out, in “unaccustomed heat,” a crazy person igniting our sense of his denied rights, his right to have some of what we have and he doesn’t.

Then our figuring—thinking, imagining, in wild speculation—runs on further, turning sharply from the bedraggled assertion of rights to a, 

“new-age Salvationist, holy among your cow-parsley 
and roses.”

With this, figuring has reached its apex. 

Now, a certain detached, calm,  rational sobriety asserts itself in the poem’s last four lines. Vernacularity ends. The language is now formal 

“Meanwhile” which is to say, now or at the time, and is also to say, background becomes foreground, becomes actuality, there is “unaccustomed heat.” The actuality of the heat intrudes on and moves to the side all the figuring. It makes itself momentarily predominant.

Metaphor returns with the second “Meanwhile” as we have the metaphor of a sky “tunnelling upward.” We can think of the thickness, the enervating heaviness, of “unaccustomed heat.” We can then imagine the sky trying in effect to dig up through the heat to reach its own lightness, likened to digging underground or through massive rock to create a new opening. 

The poem’s end with the juxtaposition of  order—“sense of proportion” in tandem with managed prettiness, “golden section of elder hedge”—and a kind of subsuming finale—chaos, but, then again, chaos as observed and understood —“then the disgraceful paddock gone wild.” Paradoxically here, the speaker  intellectually notes the prevailing chaos.

So, might we theorize another aspect of lodging given the shift to the more formal language in the last four lines right after “your cow-parsley and roses”?

That aspect may be this: with the conversational vernacular—“You could figure it…”—gone, do the last four lines, with their echo of Wallace Stevens, signify a return to more conventional, formal poetry? 

If so, then has what’s gone before with its colloquial conversational quality lodged within the formal frame provided by the last four lines? Might it be that what precedes them is a poem within a poem? 

The poem ends with “then”  leading into the chaos of “the disgraced paddock gone wild.” Does this last portion of the last line recapitulate the unsettling shock of the stranger in the garden as evident in the wildness of the figuring welling up from the unconscious?  

Therefore, in sum, The Lodger immerses itself in how we might understand the unfolding of responses triggered by the shock of a strange, seemingly crazy man, seemingly come from out of nowhere, taking up lodging, so to say, in one’s garden and in one’s consciousness and imagination.