Chicken Out of Hell
An Andrew
Hamlin Joint
Disappearer Dept.: "I'll Be Missing
You" by Puff Daddy. Walking north up
University Avenue and again, several weeks later
at a rowdy party, it fastened me in a grip a good
friend might use if I was one step from an open
manhole or the equivalent--firm, decisive, but
with a tensile strength sufficient to bruise
memory. I can't tell what Puff is muttering and
don't really care to; stripping away mystery from
a song sometimes strips away attraction as well. Faith
Evans
of course is singing to her departed common-law
husband, the Notorious B.I.G., and right now at least,
that's more incongruous than anything.
Turn
on MTV and you'll see Biggie alive and well as
ever, if you ignore a few odd turns of signifier
(in "Mo Money Mo Problems" he's
confined to a TV screen within your TV screen, a
dollop of cold distance even Puffy's zero-g
hand-jiving can't quite counterbalance).
But
it's the thrumming of that purloined riff from
"Every Breath You Take" by the Police
that keeps me bruised and memorious, that guided
me up a staircase away from the rowdy party to
wrinkle my brow, even with the recollection of
how music obsession had kept me mentally isolated
from other parties (I once spent an evening in
Everett luring people into a bedroom and playing
the Modern Lovers' "Road Runner," album
version, on a cassette deck with the sweaty vim
of a zealot who's found Buddha in a head of
lettuce; eventually everyone dropped acid and
watched the first "Die Hard" movie).
Unnerving to remember how that sinister ostinato is
"Every Breath You Take"; unsettling to
remember Sting's logically lunatic exposition,
written just before his divorce, became a
Valentine salutation between lovers old and new,
first dance at a few weddings even; and finally,
unbelievable that this aural psyche could make
such an easy leap to another cause. From a
desperate attempt to recover love to an even more
desperate one to measure life and loss.
Several
weeks later I found myself on a couch at the
plasma bank, KUBE-93 all but drowned in the white
noise whir of collection machines, soft voices
beckon to me. Yes, it's "I'll Be Missing
You," but without the riff, which in this
setting can't be heard for more than a few
isolated seconds, the song loses all exposition,
all forward motion; it is simply ghostly voices
reverberating as from a cave in the dead of
night, and what they might wish to impart becomes
far less critical than the desire to run away.
Then a nice happy song grafted from the chorus to
"When Doves Cry" takes its place.
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