What is a second? A lot of meanings come to mind: the one who stands beside you in a duel, the one who will continue to fight if there is no ‘satisfaction’, the one who will bury you if necessary, the one that is a life or death moment away from you. A second is also not the first. It’s something worn or reduced because it didn’t qualify as good enough, meaning it’s the second tick of a clock that runs from new to obsolete. A second counts moments. Here’s what we say about it: the second comes from the most ancient math known, from the counting of time in base60. Why base60? Because it combines the most elements of counting … I don’t want to do this. I just realized I can’t type this here; it’s too much like work, so I’ll need to write it out as ‘work’ before I’m comfortable saying in a conversational tone that the meter is the length of the relationship between a Thing and a field of Things when reduced to the minimum of the counting dimensions inherent in base60. That means the ‘second’ is the count of the inversion of the field, and the meter varies as the strength of the field changes. There’s no way that makes sense to anyone but me.
I feel kind of wicked. Not sure where this is heading but think of base10 magnification, meaning the addition of a decimal place with a 0 before or after. Now think of 1. Now think of another 1. Now think of another 1. That’s all you need. The second 1 creates a 0 where the other 1 ‘was’ and that means when you shift back to the first 1 that creates a 0 where the second 1 ‘was’. The third 1 changes everything! A change is that you count two 1’s plus another 1, which makes both 2 and assigns a 0 to it compared to the other 1. Do I need to point out this makes 6? This expands in base10, just as 1 expands to 10 and 2 to twenty, except 60 has this specific, perfect arrangement of a group versus 1 where any 1 is in the exact same relationship to any group. Every larger count has more complicated group versus 1 relationships. This perfection extends to base60. The Sumerians and whoever they got this from captured an incredibly deep truth: this is the elemental manner by which a group to 1 relationship expands and contracts.
A meter has two parts. The idea is inherent in the conception of space-time: there is a physical length that we use in our physical methods and there is the ordering of events in this space in what we count as time. This is also true in music: the meter counts not only the beat lengths, meaning the wavelength, but also the beat counts, meaning the frequency. If you slow music down, you extend the wavelengths of the notes and that drops the frequency of the notes, though not necessarily the frequencies of the individual pitches to the extent you allow changes within your definition of ‘music’. The count of a meter in any place – like here – is directly related to the strength of the gravitational field because that strength also varies the second. It helps to think that as the strength of the field translates into a Thing as it continues to exist in the field, that transformation – it’s an inversion – gets more or less complicated. That means time has a ‘runtime’ aspect.
‘Runtime’ is a weird word: it mean how long an operation takes, but of course that is a basic fact of relativity. People realized this back when Albert showed time dilation but the meanings of the generalization are less well understood. They actually can’t be understood completely through physical principles. That is what Albert had issues with, not that ‘God plays dice with the universe’. I mean he knew that explanations exist which generate patterns, which generate constants values and processes. He couldn’t unpack what he could see or, more accurately I think, what he could sense and feel. The best way I can say this is an example: people who spend time listening to modern classical music become highly ‘attuned’ to the nuances of space and harmony in modern classical music. That’s stuff most people can’t hear. Albert could hear relativity very well. He knew there was something there but he couldn’t make out the notes. Did that bother him? Yeah, it did.
I’m listening to Reputation again as I type. I had my doubts about her. I used to avoid listening to her. Not sure exactly why now except, well, the only example that comes to mind is I used to refer to her sitting in the bleachers song as the stalker song. Don’t get me wrong: I could respect the words, the story, the earnestness, the execution, but it was so controlled that it bothered me she told this story so expertly from such a specific perspective. I can point to a million lyrics: that kind of control is very rare. Lyrics by their nature tend to hint, to talk around a subject using metaphor and simile. The best lyrics are typically sketches. That she told stories so clearly, so intimately, and with such perfect emotional pitch in the lyric form felt so highly calculated to me that I wondered about the person who could be so calculating and yet could sound so earnest and intelligent.
It wasn’t until 1989 came out that I heard a song which caused me to listen again. That song was Clean, and what grabbed me was the singing of the first line. I can sing anything but I can’t sing that unless I have it absolutely right. I squeeze melodies into lots of shapes, adjust the pitches, change the shape of my mouth, shift the location of my voice in my head, alter the way of vocalizing the sounds, but I couldn’t change that melody without getting it bluntly wrong. I consider that a perfectly tuned melody; it exists in a specific way and only in that way because – and this blew me away – she creates the impossibility at the beginning of the melody and executes it along the way until it becomes obvious there is only one path (and you’re not on it) at the key point near the end. I know how this is done: you have to be able to hear the melody backwards in your head. I’m not saying she hears backwards but that she – intuitively? consciously? – counts back from the end of each part. That’s ridiculously rare in almost anything, and it’s absurdly rare in music. My work revolves around bidirectional counting of multi-dimensional identity … and here she’s been doing that all along. I should have picked up on it earlier.
I started with a playlist, picked what sounded like the simplest songs – I was aiming for her earliest – and realized she executes with the same degree of perfection in every song. At every age. Not only age appropriately for ‘her’ but for her audience, and with layers of intelligence that became deeper and clearer with each record. In one song, she starts with a country sound that’s underlaid with a partially pop rhythm, so they fit together in slightly unusual, just the right amount of jarring manner, and then she changes her vocal with smooth subtlety through the contrast to transform the song – as she was transforming herself – from country into pop without any obvious seams. I would argue any of her records shows the depth of awareness you see in The Beatles finest work.
I still had doubts. 1989 expanded her universe but I still questioned whether she was as deep as I could see she might be. Reputation … I avoided it. I avoided listening to any of the songs released in advance because, bluntly, I was totally focused on my work and feared she might not be as good as I needed. I relied a lot – completely – on the analysis that she is what I see in her, and that made me anxious: what if she’d peaked, had reached her limits, had cracked up, etc. I needed her to be extraordinary: the better she is, the more I ‘use’ her to illuminate what is in me. She so far exceeded my expectations that I don’t have words for that. I could write in great depth about any of the songs and the intention behind every part, and every part of every part, every repeat that changes slightly, every surprise, every emotional ploy and nuance, every vocalization choice because, again, it’s completely obvious that she actually controls each of these elements, just as she has from the beginning but now across depths of connections. And she’s doing this organically, as a natural outgrowth of herself. She is the master. I am in awe of her. My only issue now is that whatever I do is not good enough. Have to do better!
jomi: playing with perception 