Is a sense of freedom only visible in obvious counterpoint to oppressive circumstances?
Or is it self-evident, in a suprarational sense?

There was a beautiful sense of oppressive counterpoint evident in Pharrell Williams’s single Freedom (2015)—and particularly in its music video—the first of so many hidden little gems that reveal it to be so much more than a feel-good hit tailor-made for generic banking commercials. Everything about this tune is in one place or another; a place for everything, and everything in its place!
Or so we might think…

Despite the palpable identification of downtroddenness that the track evokes, nothing stays as it is for very long. Sympathy for the subjugated has a purely negative function to rectify the dramatic crisis moment. It’s almost as if Pharrell the artist has to paint the clearest picture possible to remind us that the view will soon change. That’s the heart of his black slaves in the music video (the most obvious examples), who heroically engender an emboldened resistance against their oppressors. So too, this is the future for all those who cannot yet see the light or the end of the tunnel: the sweat shop workers, the hijabi-clad woman who recalls Steve McCurry’s photo of Sharbat Gula, the poor children of nameless global slums. It’s the destiny for every downtrodden victim of false consciousness—particularly those we don’t imagine—so entrapped by the heat, stink, and speed of the rat race that they do not yet know of their subjugation to invisible rhythms of relentless probing and panicking. And if there was an excessive focus on the visibly enchained, the attentive detail to the residents of city-life and their obvious sort of alienation readily clarified the salvation of temporal agitation that promises to overturn all that is solid.

The Iron Cage will be no more:
from the river to the sea, the financiers of London shall be free!

Just hearing the graceful yet impassioned swells of Pharrell’s voice provides suitable proof of entrapment’s dynamic reversibility through which the hunter outmanoeuvres his prey not through strength of arms, but through the careful observation of evident weakness. And when he strikes, it his prey itself which ultimately falls, by virtue of its predictability and simple patterning, into the trap. His alternating volume matches, in its pianissimo, the piano vamps that fill an almost acoustic silence, an almost-chilling reflection on a state of imperfection that bursts through the spirit of its own contradiction into the flowering of power, voice, and soul. We should recognize this as Pharrell’s greatest homage to trans-Atlantic black music: that quiet call into the audience that bends the collective ear into thought and in short order to action, bringing forth a resounding crash of passion and concentration in perfect concert. Listening to Freedom is like listening to a gospel tune in that sense. It’s got a great hopefulness brought out by the preacher’s concerned musings calm enough to inspire serious reflection. Such introspection is rewarded by those great bursts of beautiful, pained resistance though which accesses an articulate yet wholly distant sort of naturalness: the alterity of aesthetic freedom, which graces our voices for no more than a moment.

There is something deeply disturbing about the world of constant upheaval and imbalance through which Pharrell’s humble historical traveller guides us. It is comfortable of course in the seat of the denied, the deferred, the rejected who seek justice. But Pharrell takes a certain comfort in the ruination of all that is and will be, a clarity that gives pause to any liberatory impulse. Williams is no choir leader, summoning his flock to action with calls of fire, brimstone, and ultimately of salvation. He is a bluesman: a poor young man in tattered rags who has no need to cultivate the reverend’s necessary distance of the damned and the saved. Rather, the bluesman’s grit, grin, and grime speak directly to us in a pure sort of emotional boogie-woogie groove. It’s not that we want to be amongst the saints, but rather that will Pharrell’s bluesman character we know we’re already in that number. It’s him and I, sitting quietly not in the comforting churches of women, children, and comforting community but in the rugged hardships of the woods, sitting in a rundown shotgun shack with empty moonshine bottles adorning the cracked floorboards.

In his pioneering collection ethnographic collections of delta blues tracks Alan Lomax notes the fundamental opposition between ministers and their tight-knit communal congregations and the solitary bluesmen, firstly transient and always subversive—particularly to young women of good moral standing. As the ‘negro recording industries’ of the 1920’s began to produce records in large numbers, the collection, standardisation, and control brought over the basically improvised nature of the blues came just as much from black church figures as it did from white record label owners. They sought a total sense of control over this sort over this transient sense of liberty that came as close to a natural endowment as possible. Yet did this sense of meandering brooding not represent itself from becoming a true aesthetic style? Pharrell’s bluesman is both Wordsworth, ecstatically wandering amongst the ruins of the great past from which he remains separated, and the mythical Ozymandias, imperiously constructing temples to his own grandeur which will one day be ruined themselves. Even amidst his revelations of oppressive truth, of the basic imprisonment that afflicts all of civilised humanity the singer loses himself in the sprawling vastness of the savannahs, in the great swathes of concrete ruin that the fiery dynamism of consumer culture has smouldered into.

The blues was always about that sense of depressive sadness that has about as close a claim to universality as we could reasonably hazard. But more importantly, it wields a poignant sense of expressive optimism in the future. This hope is not self-evident, and it is furthest from functional. Instead, it is the joy of surrendering (most often to a young woman or to the drink) that leads to a reliable sense of libidinal satisfaction, if only for a moment. It recalls, in some ways, the hobo’s comfort in the steel humming as he rode the rails: faith in where we might go precisely because, perhaps, he doesn’t know where he’s going. The only promise of salvation present in this track is a literal one: the manner in which the not-so-subtle religious message propels any striving for liberation into both an eternal and a righteous sense of being. The unity is obvious in a corporeal sense: Son and Man are made of the same stock, with the unity of humanity an incautious mirror of Trinitarian oneness. But does this insight proffer any sort of social praxis? Sure, this might constitute a sense of instructive action—a revolutionary tactic—but it’s far too melancholic for that. Its source is too deep of a sorrow: perhaps our current state of ‘oppression’ leaves many unable to fathom such hardship. This is the horizontal sense of natural freedom central to the tune itself.

Strangely, it’s that purely vital sense of directive wandering—holding on tight to lose control—that keeps the tune measured, in a sense. There’s neither a sense of deep libidinal soul-searching that Anthony Hamilton projects into his soundtrack contribution to Tarantino’s Django (2012), nor a psychedelic Afro-Caribbean haze of emotional turbulence that Beyoncé packed into Lemonade (2016). Williams, Hamilton, and Knowles’s tracks are eponymous, but it’s the ubiquity of an ephemeral ‘here but I’m gone’ ness that sets Pharrell apart. For all the video’s expressive oppositional work of ‘free and unfree’ there really is not call to action here other than the resumption of something inalienable, untimely, unexpected, unpredictable, and wholly mysterious. He’s not really asking for anything, no less than decrying anything specific. You have express need of Pharrell’s supportive visuals to conjure up ghosts here: the track, particularly against Hamilton and Knowles’s evident languishing through inhumanity, is simply an exercise in call and response.

Back                                                   
                            and                                         
                                                    forth!

And this indicates nothing more than the surprising strength of freedom as a purely aesthetic value. As Nietzsche described, this is the fundamentally inaccessible secret at the heart of every human being, separated but by a glass wall of truth and illusion. Which is it? We cannot say. Nor can we attempt to engage it, comprehend it, or articulate it: anyone who claims this power is trying to sell you something. Perhaps all that can be done, the great hope that remains in this world (though it is not for us) is that we might lose this freedom upon a need for it, that its mystery might transport us into a genuinely bewildering sense of newness and creative excess (the only excess which does not collapse into itself). This generative preponderance is joyful and carefree, concerned only with what it does not know. Excess of every other sort will, no doubt, command this into an ideological structure that attempts to smother the world in its hegemony. This is expected perhaps, and maybe even a natural sort of outcome. What saves it, from any potentially grim conclusion, is its fundamental mobility, the power of its evasiveness, its deftness, its sheer incomprehensibility.

And this gives rise, thankfully, to the tacit conclusion that solidarity must be built upon something else, anything else, anything more predictable, controllable, reliable, moral, and dialogical. If, through this sense of escapist freedom we should be so lucky as to discover new worlds, these worlds just as much discover us in return. The unrepresentability of Reality is mercifully present, if nothing else, as its opposite, its own inverse, the radical negativity of its own impossibility damned to the earth and indeed cursed to live and prosper. To discover the self in this way is to discover no inalienable truths save those of progress, temporality, and the dynamism of motion. With this clarity in mind, we are left to salvage something, anything else, from the wreckage in which to construct a sense of communal solidarity: save the inescapable non-entity of escapist freedom.

13 September 2022