The Heart of the City

Aaron Asphar is an academic, smart guy and appreciator of hip-hop, R&B and electro (as I've gathered). Aaron and I met online through his leaving very charming comments on this blog. After talking further with him, it became clear that he shared a similar appreciation and comprehension of the hip-hop art form as Will and I, so I invited him to join the blog. This is his first post - an appreciation of the classic R&B group the Bobby Blue Band's "Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City."

Bobby Blue Band - Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City

In the research I’ve done into Western alienation, in all theoretical expressions a motif always arises: the indissoluble experience of separation and depersonalization, which are two sides of the petrified schism that produces the experience of self-world, the latter which becomes alien and indifferent. When social reality alienates – when it becomes indifferent to your emotional reality, you are alienated and that alienation is existential, which is to say emotional and sensuous, i.e. somatic, physical, and in this alienation reality becomes emotionally dissolute, which is to say alienated. Because you don’t fit with the world, you become negative in relation to the social order, and you have a choice of “obliterate yourself by identifying with it”, as Horkheimer said, or by radicalizing social reality in some way – humanizing it or transforming it, and here we link alienation to creativity. What drives creativity in all music, art, culture and social life, is this negativity which lacks readymade tools for its social articulation and hence recognition and amelioration. Through counter-culture like early Blues, the negativity of the alienated self spoke out , in music, art, culture, and the social space this created. Emotional negativity was socialised and turned into meaningful cultural and social reality.

When blues emerged in the early twentieth century it often embodied predictable and repetitive elements and patterns of development, but sometimes dragging, predictable quality, in itself a commentary on the texture of an increasingly industrialized social life, was stretched out like the skin on a drum by instruments elastic enough for the body to punch out its own emotional, existential poetic in the tones and intonations of the voices and instruments, and through the movements – and this imageless moment of the music is what gave blues its poetic, or its cohesiveness, and I see this poetic as that which strengthens and matures in what becomes differentiated as soul music, and that the poetics of souls and the blues emerge out of the drive to overcome the limitations of an alienated or alienating social reality, and the music itself is simultaniously a critique of social reality/order and counter-reality/order.

In this song by the Bobby "Blue" Band, ‘Aint No Love in the Heart of the City’, we can see this humanization in the lyrics themselves. The song expresses negativity in the form of an emotional critique of the social, or an expression of social alienation, but this negativity also is the source of hope, because it recognises more clearly in the almost totally dissolute reality that which speaks through it, that which always transcends it, which is to say love. In this sense love is used to reconcile or redeem social reality. The lyrics are as follows:

Ain't no love in the heart of the city
Ain't no love in the heart of town
Ain't no love and it's sure nuff a pity
Ain't no love cause you ain't around

When you were mine
Oh, I was feeling good
Cause you lovlied up
This whole nieghborhood

But now that you're gone
You know the sun don't shine
From the city hall to the county line
That's why I said

Ain't no love in the heart of the city
Ain't no love in the heart of town
Ain't no love and it sure is a pity
Ain't no love cause you ain't around

Every place that I go
Oh, it seems so strange
Without you there
Things have changed

The nights are cold
There's a blanket of gloom
Another trick I saw
In my lonely room

I said ain't no love
In the heart of the city
Ain't no love in the heart of town
Ain't no love, ain't any pity
Ain't no love cause you ain't around

And now that you're gone
Oh, the sun don't shine
From the city hall to
The county line, I said

Ain't no love in the heart of the city
Ain't no love in the heart of town
Ain't no love, it sure is a pity
Ain't no love cause you ain't around
Cause you ain't around

Ain't no love in the heart of the city
Ain't no love in this great big old town
Ain't no love and ain't it a pity
Ain't no love cause you ain't around

Ain't no love in the heart of the city
Ain't no love in the heart of this town

What is worth picking up on is these poetics of a dissolute city, lacking emotional investment - a separation from it, or alienation by it, and as a result he is noticing that the meaning structure of life is not provided by the city, the sublime of the city shines through, and this sublime is the non-city of love. Love, which is to say emotional-social reality is identified as redemption, which makes reality meaningful, and this is the impulse that drives soul music. Without this love, the bare social, that lamented by the early blues, is what is left. We can see in the video itself how this lyric forms part of a cohesive and elastic whole:



What I find here exemplifies what we can always find in always find is that when music or art/culture of any kind is the voice of real experience, or a way of dealing with this experience, the form and the emotion of the music cohere – they are indissoluble. Words, images and form are used to express meaning, movement and emotion, and hence the form and the force are a dynamic, elastic unity.

We could contrast this to musicians compromised by social demands, goals or injunctions, for example the demands of a market or the goal of money or fame, then the mind is divided against the meaning content, and takes over the art, emphasising the formal elements of the music (style/genre/looks/coriography/affect) which take over and liquidate the emotional content, causing the art to become more superficial, formulaic or reified. However, sometimes the work becomes compromised but the emotional content is not disavowed, and exert itself but in an antagonistic, contradictory and schismatic way, and here we have an expression of compromised or ‘heteronomous’ (as opposed to autonomous) subjectivity today, which is not cohesive but dissociative, at odds with itself.

An example of this can be made of Eminem at times, and this is an important expression of social reality, in that it evokes honestly the status of the contemporary subject: artistic, polemic exposition, though not a model for self-emancipation. For me the importance of recognising these poetics and polarities is to build a language of resistance to the social process and its effect on music, which is always to involuted and circumscribe it, to tear it out of its meaningful social context and its humane social commitments. However, it seems to me that artistic praxis embodies this awareness and wisdom: for the function of bringing it to light would be to become not more self-conscious about it but become more self-confident in it.

This is Michael again. I'd like to add that the Bobby "Blue" Band was sampled by Kanye West while he was producing beats for Jay-Z's Blueprint 2 album: