Music Write-Ups
How do you know Chris Earley?
How many MP3s do you have on your hard drive?
Ah, the five-day work week. Apparently it didn’t
become common practice until after WWII, and the
forty-hour week was a major victory for family,
culture, and actual humans vs. the giant capitalist
hegemons of the industrial age. Nonetheless, I’m
probably not alone in feeling like the current
requirements for subsistence still produce a strange,
myopic delirium—five-sevenths of your life passing by
in a caffeinated hum, leaving two precious days to
indulge in yourself, nature, booze, curiosity, the
people you love, unnecessary sleep, voluntary
conversation, food, actual life.
And when R. Kelley sings “Sippin on Coke and rum, I’m
like so what I’m drunk, It’s the freakin weekend baby,
I’m about to have me some fun,” he’s giving a great
fuck-you to the workweek and a great celebration of
the weekend. But at the same time, there’s an element
of catharsis, as though his being drunk and saying “so
what”would lose all meaning without the preceding five
days. That is, without work he’d be out of a paycheck
and, as importantly, he’d be without a forum for the
sweet, decadent release that comprises this song.
In the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia, in which
the social order was reversed—slaves treated their
masters as slaves and everyone got drunk—the status
quo depended on its temporary upheaval, and the
upheaval itself depended on “normal” life for its
existence and its meaning. Similarly, the weekend
requires the workweek, which in turn depends on the
weekend. And this is the rhythm of most of our lives.
While a lot of our pop music feeds us pointless
stories of endless leisure and riches, ol’ Robert
Sylvester gives us a track that celebrates the same
push and pull his working- and middle-class listeners
deal with week after week.
Also, it sounds freaking good. Listen for the gestures
towards dancehall and old-school R&B, and a keyboard
line that owes a little something to 80’s new wave.
P.S. Don’t get me started on “Trapped in The Closet.”
It’s very, very good.
-Richard Mills
[Note: From time-to-time, with the permission of the author, we will be posting some of the write-ups that were orginally published when Song of the Day was in email-only form. Today’s song and write-up were first featured on August 18, 2006]