Review: Joji — SMITHEREENS
Only one half of the subject. Or: the fractured subject.
The album begins and I am confused. My expectations were low, my mood accordingly lousy. I didn’t know Joji before. This work is the first my ears have been allowed to hear, and I can say right away: I am surprised. The first song, “Glimpse of Us” is a ballad about a past love that won’t let go of the artist. She seems irreplaceable to him, his thoughts are constantly with her, even when he is with another person. The lyrics are so beautifully open that the artist could just as well be singing about music itself. As a past love that just won’t let him go. In general, this album, even if it is very short, is a decidedly coherent work. Each song builds to some extent on the basic theme and the previous mood. Aesthetically, I find something is missing. The depth of the concept does not transfer to the music we hear. Many of the individual songs seem as if they were not integrated into the lyrics. As if the lyrics themselves were a separate work that just happened to be there, and that made me wonder: So what if the new love the artist can’t seem to warm up to is poetry? And yet he longs for the past love, which is of course music, which is now with other artists? And only in brief moments do the old memories emerge and become a “Glimpse of Us”. A togetherness of two individuals who become a “we”, a kind of natural dialectical process, with a thesis, an antithesis and finally a synthesis. Unfortunately, to support this interpretation, the synthesis is missing. The album is divided into two parts (mediated by caps lock in the titles, among other things), the third part is missing. The song “BLAHBLAHBLAH DEMO” is also divided into two distinctive parts, the third part, the synthesis, is also missing there. I therefore plead that it must be the task of the critique to fill this gap. We are the synthesis that is missing. We are the second half of a unilaterally present subject that moves in spheres between the Freudian death wish (“Todestrieb”), that is, that “destructive force of non-being at the heart of being” (SZ1), and the contradictory world of passionless passions. The subject itself is broken into “smithereens” and it is our duty to recombine it, melt it together with our own synthesis, else it will forever stay fragmented. One could also say that we have to bring the shards back together, fuse them and then bring them back into their original form, for example by blacksmithing. And is not the art of blacksmithing characterized precisely by the fact that it only deforms rather than adds or supplements anything? Isn’t this very quality one of the greatest similarities to music, which also consists of a given spectrum of notes that only become a work of its own through their sequence (one could also say form)? I think we have to answer “yes” to all these questions.
One song in particular stood out for me personally, namely “Die For You”. It is a special work from several perspectives, but its specialness is revealed above all when we put aside ideological criticism for a moment, just for once, and instead devote ourselves entirely to philosophy. The song begins with a very interesting verse, not only from an aesthetic perspective:
“Swear I couldn’t sleep a wink last night
No point in turning off the lights” (Die For You).
What of all things makes this verse so interesting? Exactly, the abstinence of the dream, whereby the artist does not feel compelled to turn off the lights, but which itself leads to further sleeplessness. Cause and effect thus merge into a dialectic of their own. The beauty of poetry is that, for this reason, both lines can be reversed without changing the sense or losing any of the aesthetics:
“No point in turning off the lights
Swear I couldn’t sleep a wink last night” (ibid).
The process of not sleeping thus becomes an existence-denying process, because the subject itself can no longer tell which of the two processes precedes the other, they merge into a truthless truth, an existence without conditioned existence. The subject itself fractures between the two lines and dissolves into a condition of a condition. Something comparable can also be found in the work of the post-structuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his essay “Das radikale Denken” he states the following:
“It is not true that in order to live one must be convinced of one’s own existence, there is no need for that. Our consciousness is never the echo of our existence in real time anyway, but its echo in difference time, the screen of the fragmentation of the subject and its identity (only in sleep, unconsciousness, and death do we exist in real time, are we identical with ourselves).” (JB1, 5).
But precisely that sleep is denied to the artist because something is lacking for him. Superficially, the head of his beloved on his shoulders, but we have to abstract at this point in order to arrive at an actual interpretation. The pre-chorus around the lyric line “Burning photos, had to learn to let go” is of particular assistance to us. We must not in any way ignore the presence of photography at this point. While it can be argued that the following chorus has a higher value than this relatively narrow passage simply by virtue of its position, we should not forget that photography has had a dual function within art history since its emergence and thus carries its own dialectic with it. On the one hand, it is used to photograph, record, and catalogue works of art. On the other, it is itself a work of art. The photo in the song is described as an analogue photo, which has particular relevance for us, considering the fact that Baudrillard has already been quoted by me. Baudrillard, in his essay “Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?”, in addition to his perspective on photography, took an interesting Hegelian approach to modern art itself. In essence, his thesis is that art in modernity only exists because it disappears (see JB2, 14). Baudrillard then goes on to carry out the Hegelian approach as follows:
“[N]ot only the art of making the real disappear in favour of another setting [the digital world, author’s note], but also the art of annulling itself in the course of its own exercise (Hegel).” (JB2, 14).
Analogue photography, then, sets itself apart precisely by not disappearing into another setting and thus resisting the process of decomposition. It is fascinating, however, that the artist himself cancels this resistance by burning the images and thus also cancels the practice itself or the memory of the practice itself. But while a digital photo is deleted within seconds, something always remains of an analogue image. Complete disintegration is only possible in the digital space. At this point, then, the album connects the analogue and digital worlds, or rather, transfers the analogue differentiated self into the digital indifferent self. Baudrillard provides us with a very beautiful and apt description of this process:
“Today it is difficult to be more indifferent to reality than to the facts themselves, more indifferent to the sense of the world than to its images.” (JB1, 20).
This process, this indifference to the world, of dissolution reaches its climax in the song “Dissolve”:
“Who are we?
Who have we become?
Are we counting sheep until we dissolve?” (Dissolve).
The artist’s dispassion is easy to recognize in this verse. But where does it come from? What is its origin? Is it really the past love that plagues the artist, or is it something more? I think it is something more. Let’s look at the cover artwork for a moment. Two colours, green and a dark almost black blue, gradually merge to become the colour of our sky. The dialectic of the album thus announces itself even before we have heard it. We have to interpret the sky blue as the very synthesis that is missing, as the half of the subject that the artist is trying to depict. The individual thus disappears between all its differences. Or as Baudrillard puts it:
“But what is the use of being free of passion in a passionless world, or unconstrained in a disinterested world? Thus, one finds oneself as an orphan.” (JB1, 20).
And doesn’t the subject portrayed describe precisely this kind of passionless world? Doesn’t it say at one point a little further into the song, “Please don’t leave me behind”? The subject, through the absence of a thing/person, no longer feels like a full self, but instead evaporates into a dot between the dark blue and green of the album artwork. It is neither itself nor is it anything else, it lingers in between. It is no wonder, then, that the last thing we hear in “Dissolve” is the question “Who?”. There is no longer a “who” between all the “us”. I therefore plead for this album not to be interpreted as a mere relationship album, but instead as part of an ongoing process of alienation from ourselves through digital mediality and social media. This is where an argument should actually start, but Baudrillard sees it differently. In his essay “Das radikale Denken”, which I have already quoted enough here, he argues for a new “radical thinking”. This radical thinking is characterized by the fact that it does not need this very defence:
“It’s not that the radical thought needs to be defended. Every idea that one defends is considered guilty, and every idea that does not defend itself deserves to disappear.” (JB1, 20).
Unfortunately, I cannot end the critique on a high-note. There would be something missing. So far we have only reviewed the first half of the album and admittedly, contrary to my expectations, it is enjoyable. Regrettably, however, this brilliance evaporates to some extent in the second half of the work. There are many reasons for this, one of which is certainly the stylistic and aesthetic inconsistency (this itself could also be received as an anti-thesis again and as a confirmation of the above thesis), but also in terms of content, new attackable surfaces are formulated that we simply cannot ignore from an ideology-critical perspective. This would be tantamount to betraying ourselves, so further analysis must darken a little. In the end, there is no such thing as the perfect work anyway.
In the song “YUKON (INTERLUDE)” the lyrical self is captured. At this point, it doesn’t matter in what way, only the fact that it has obviously been deprived of its own freedom is significant. It also doesn’t matter if it confirms the theory about the break between Joji and his label. Only the last two lines are really crucial:
“My voice will be their voice until I’m free
My hands will be their hands until I’m free” (YUKON (INTERLUDE)).
At this point, an ideological generality is established, namely that there is any freedom at all to which one can flee into. Let’s assume for a moment that this is actually about the dispute between Joji and his label. He feels unfree in this relationship, but at the same time proclaims through this song that there is freedom behind this lack of freedom, and that only his label prevents him from attaining this exact freedom. But this is not the case, as Slavoj Žižek states:
“Every ideological generality — freedom or equality, for example — is ‘false’ insofar as there is always a particular case that breaks with its unity and exposes its falsity.” (SZ2, 51).
According to him, it is always a certain specific freedom that undermines itself in the process of attainment:
“This means that this freedom is precisely the opposite of real freedom: By selling his labour power ‘freely’, the worker loses his freedom — in this free sale, the worker is in fact enslaved by capital.” (SZ2, 52).
In the above example, note additionally the algorithmic freedom. Even without a label, Joji has to adhere to certain norms that are established and constantly reformed by the platforms and ultimately by our usage behaviour. Even without his label, the artist is never truly free. The freedom to offer one’s own works means at the same time the lack of freedom to decide for oneself how these works should function. The freedom of the artist is thus always also limited by our consumer behaviour and by the platforms, such as Spotify and even TikTok. Today’s music always has to offer the necessary catchyness at the same time to be able to compete on TikTok and not sink into oblivion. There is no freedom to escape into. At least not in a world driven by consumption, which is partly criticized in the last song:
“And I’m tired of this madness
Tired of being stranded
I don’t wanna be alone” (1AM FREESTYLE).
It is no coincidence at this point that the album ends with these precise words. It is the perfect end to the second half of the album (and the first half of the splitted subject) and almost makes us forget the missing second half of the subject. There is a very beautiful quote by Martin Heidegger that I think reflects the artist’s dichotomy, this inner conflict, very well:
“But it is not aloneness, but loneliness. In the big cities, man can easily be more alone than almost anywhere else. But he can never be lonely there. For loneliness, it has the inherent power not to isolate us, but to throw the whole of existence into the vast proximity of the essence of all things”. (MH, 11).
And isn’t that what this album is about? If we understand the city drawn by Martin Heidegger not as a city, but instead as the digital world, then this process coincides exactly with our previous analysis. Just as people were increasingly drawn to cities in Martin Heidegger’s time, people are now increasingly drawn to the digital world (metaverse, social media, etc.). Only that we have not yet completely disappeared into the digital world, there are still remnants of us who, like Martin Heidegger in his time, still recognize the difference between aloneness and loneliness. As much as the album itself doesn’t come to a synthesis, we come to one that we don’t necessarily like, but that doesn’t matter, it doesn’t change its existence. We have no influence on the processes, on the fine web of ideological connections. That is decided by others, for example, by the big tech companies or at the stock market, etc. And us? We are forced to stay in between, to linger between listening and hearing. We are in an intermediate layer, a neither-nor state. What remains is only the insight that this cannot be everything, that we, like Martin Heidegger, want to be lonely, but by no means alone. This album creates exactly that feeling. It throws us “into the far proximity of the essence of all things” (ibid), but it does not tell us what we will encounter there. We decide that for ourselves, just as it should be, but hasn’t been for a long time.
Citations:
JB1 (*): Baudrillard, Jean: Das radikale Denken (Fröhliche Wissenschaft), Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2013.
JB2 (*): Baudrillard, Jean: Warum ist nicht schon alles verschwunden? (Fröhliche Wissenschaft), Matthes & Seitz Berlin, 2008.
MH (*): Martin Heidegger: Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? [1933]. In: Ders.: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976. Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 13. Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann 1983, 9–13.
SZ1 (*): Žižek, Slavoj, Hegel im verdrahteten Gehirn (E-Book), Frankfurt am Main: FISCHER, 2020.
SZ2 (*): Žižek, Slavoj, Das erhabene Objekt der Ideologie, Wien: Passagen Verlag 2021 (1989 Originalausgabe bei Verso).
* Translation from German by myself.
