Most of my work is thinking about thoughts. I do this to recover my real thoughts, meaning the layers of thoughts from before I can remember and the layers of thought I set aside or lost contact with as I grew up. And I do this to generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self. Take the ‘And’ at the beginning of the last sentence: I mean ‘I also do this’ referring back to the first sentence in which I think about thoughts, and I mean in reference to the immediately prior sentence. The first reference mean that as I think about thoughts, I generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self. Pretend the second sentence is not there and read the first and third until you see the layers of meaning that run between them. They’re hard to pin down: why true self? Why generate thoughts more in accordance with my true self? What if my true self does a lousy job of thinking? What choice do I have? I can’t think about thoughts in any other way because everything I think is my thought, even when I really feel like I’m pretending as well as I can to be someone else or to think like someone else. Since I must think, what is the best way for me to think? That’s not ‘cogito ergo sum’ because existence of the thinker isn’t the issue; the quality of the thinker’s thoughts is. If you draw a line pointing toward quality, there’s an opposite of everything that is not quality.
I had no idea when I started typing I’d end that paragraph talking about the directionality of existence when mapped to the essential process statement inherent in existence. That is a succinct way of stating what I do as work. I take any existence and map it to its process statements.
A thought about Taylor Swift – Tali, as I refer generally to her here – the sound ‘thing’ I was looking for in her next album after 1989 was that she extend her mastery of simple forms. She can do any form. People don’t realize the extent of her gifts: she can take any form. I wanted to see her mix forms. I knew she could do it because I heard her modulate (with fine control) between forms in Fearless. I wanted to see her – should probably say hear her but that is seeing to me – mix forms within the pop genre within a song. I said that carefully: pop genre forms extend across a wide range, and I wanted to see her mix forms across that breadth. Why? Because that’s a level of affinity with me. Go back to the first paragraph: I have only my thoughts, so the reason I wanted to see her do that matches thoughts in me about how you should mix forms, and thoughts about what that sounds like when done really well. And the reason behind my thoughts is: I think I play like that and I think I am really, really good at modulating between forms across types of jazz, across ethnic musical genres, and so on. I also think I’m really good at playing genre forms I alter to fit my conception of the form instead of replicating the exact, learned form. That level of affinity I’ve written about: she alters the same riffs I do and alters them in a way that sounds exactly right, both instrumentally and vocally. Note I’m not saying I’d do the riffs the exact same way she does but that her choices are all perfectly logical to me. I can see and feel them arranged as thoughts within the riff.
Playing with forms, putting them together, conveys great depth of information because each form carries with it a vast amount of connotation. If I start talking about her growth in vocal command … Just count the voices she uses in any song: some have 6 separate voices, some elaborately and delicately altered, some richened, one as plain as being in a room. And each conveys a character in a role in the story she tells through playing with the forms across all those levels. Ask yourself: have you ever seen or heard that before? The answer is you’ve seen bits and pieces done like that, typically in a story song that shifts between genres, like Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. She does this on every song, sometimes being obvious and sometimes with great subtlety.
Beyond that, she plays with your head in other great ways too. Look at the modulations behind the ‘Look what you made me do’ refrain – which repeats twice exactly 1 minute apart at the half minute. First, background noise appears for an instant, is barely there, and quickly fades so you hear her almost naked voice almost unaccompanied. Second, background noise changes but not enough so you can tell what it really is, but it has expanded enough so the point where the voice sounds alone disappears. That point is where her voice drops just enough of the accompaniment so the inevitability of the beat dissipates. Third repeat, the background noise becomes an entire worked out musical bit that not only goes to the end of the song but starts to take over. She grew another piece of music within the song. I run through the possible ways she thought of doing this, and have largely settled on a Start of her wanting her naked voice the first time and then covering it up by adding a layer that started as a bit of noise, became the start of something more specific, and then became the music that was playing in another room which she added to the first like she was turning up the sound levels to combine two different pieces of music that were playing in two different rooms. The combination of the two is the End of that thread. So I run that thread in my head from Start in her room where her naked voice accompanies the rhythm that makes the title refrain and all the meanings that connect to the choices she’s made in styling her voice so it fits exactly the way she made it fit. I then go Between as the sound of the room she’s not in Starts to get larger in the room she started in, literally inserting and underlaying the other room, emerging and submerging, growing in the background until it emerges fully grown. This takes me to the End of her combining the two rooms of music together. She is emerging herself, not as some other room in a string of rooms, but as the combination of the rooms that are her.
The question I’ve always had about Taylor Swift is whether she is what I think she is. I didn’t listen to Reputation for a while because I was afraid the answer would be no, that she’s terrific and amazingly talented and she’ll be a terrific artist for as long as she wants but no, she’s not the best. She is the best. My first words about Reputation were that it’s only not a masterpiece compared to what she will do. Nailed that.
I was mostly afraid Taylor would fail as a person. I absolutely 100% saw the absolute genius within her. I’d always been dimly aware of her genius but I wasn’t convinced of its depth because I could not see the reasons why she made the artistic choices she was making. 1989 made it clear: highest order genius, extraordinary manipulation of form across the album, the highest level of multi-dimensional spatial thinking I’ve ever seen. (Hers was so high, I had to get my own in better shape.) Note I also became aware of how well she has modulated her external life over her lifetime. I traced her history and saw iterations of the same control functions that layer meaning in her voice choices and which determine how much the music should sound like genre and how much not. When I trace, I look for similarities between representations and identify the shared process that generates them. Think data structures and the repeating algorithm behind structures. This enables me to identify how the process that generates each representation is growing or shrinking. 1989 was remarkable. Take the subtlety at the beginning of This Love as she uses the words ‘on and on’ then ‘gone and gone’ to signal changes. First iteration, ‘on and ‘on’ – and I will then – then the voice gets richer, sounding doubled with a slight pitch difference. Second repetition, short rest and the beat starts. She modulates both voice and genre through the song. That’s mature artistry. That told me who she had inside her, but it didn’t tell me who she was going to become.
What is Reputation? It’s the commitment of herself to herself and to the visions she sees and to her thoughts, which she commits to herself she will hold to eternally because she knows they are right, and she will always, always, always stay the little girl who played with the little boy in her room, under the covers, and in her head, because she knows it was and is real and that is who she is and who he is and who they are. It is a level of commitment which melds with conviction. It retains her own fears about herself and what she can and must do to make her visions come true.
This brings me back to thinking about thoughts: how do you know what to do when the only person you trust is really always your own self? You experience all the mistakes you make each day. You may not particularly care about some or even most but you generally notice some and you experience the others as you ignore them. Let’s say you get rid of all those ways of ignoring what you do and think about. Pretend you watch the flow of actions and thoughts as they happen like you’re reading lines of code and watching the execution of that code. I’m trying to bridge the gap Between the observation and layout of thoughts, which I map onto a lattice I call CMs, and the concept that you recover your true self to generate the best layout of thoughts. It has aspects of a purity problem, that the representation of thought at your most natural has patterning that is reflected in all the thought patterns you have now. Purity is directional.
Purity of what? A characteristic of self. Too greedy. Too flighty. Too lazy. Too manic. Too deep. Too self-involved. That last takes me to the difference between what is in me, and all the processes that swirl around inside me, and what I express in the world, from how I look and move, to the signals I send to others about who I am and what I’m capable of. And that means I do something, others react or don’t, and I change or adhere to what I do as that behavior iterates. What is the pattern of my thinking? It reflects me in my own head: the things I think about, the things I push aside, the things I never even visit, the thing I’m afraid to see.
(As an aside, Green Tambourine came on. It’s fascinating to unravel the choices they made that give it a dated quality. Take out and manage differently some of the vocal distortion and it plays more as current. The break needs some work too; it sounds too studio. Easy fixes and it could be closer to a real classic. And HomePod is one of the best things I’ve ever bought: from Bach to an Indian raga, from Goldfrappe to Mel Torme – Too Close for Comfort of all songs – special mention to Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass for I Didn’t Know About You – it makes the room part of my earspace. That’s what you want from the experience of listening, for it to become part of your headspace, to be able to shift background to foreground over and over as you do whatever you are doing.)
What is ‘true’ about the true self? The answer isn’t mysterious: it is what is found in every rendition of the pattern that makes you, that you can see in your inner self and what you can see in your external manifestations. That which is always there is always ‘true’ at the binary, true/false, 1 and 0 level of existence. That ‘true’ can then be read as either true of false as it is processed, so the existence of this truth can be read as saying yes or no, true or false in whatever iteration occurs and across all iterations. I’m happy with that statement.
I need to take a break. Couple of notes. First, this all maps to a lattice and I’m thinking I should call it the ‘lettice’ to distinguish CMs from other lattice forms. And it’s close to a leafy green! I may be getting too cute. I can at least say this literally: thanks for coming after me.
jomi: playing with perception 