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In September of 1964, the Beach Boys appeared for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. In their matching striped shirts, they looked as innocent as their music sounded, and their faces reflected awe at a future full of possibility. Smiling and bobbing along to the beat, they played “I Get Around.” It was the height of Beatlemania, but it was that song—their song—that was number one. The band exported their trademark sunshine pop around the world: in the mid-Sixties, they toured Australia, Europe, and Japan. Despite the endless adolescence they sang about onstage—cars! girls! surfing!—backstage, the veneer of innocence had cracked. They did drugs and fought with each other. They slept with prostitutes and left boyhood behind.
In 1965, Brian Wilson, the band’s musical mastermind, took a break from touring with the goal of producing the greatest rock and roll album of all time: Pet Sounds. This was an inflection point, when the music of the Beach Boys began to mature under Wilson’s genius direction. Last month, almost exactly 52 years after that first Ed Sullivan appearance, Brian Wilson shuffled onto the stage of Charlotte’s Belk Theater to perform Pet Sounds in its entirety. Wilson’s current tour celebrates the 50th anniversary of the record’s release and features fellow Beach Boys, Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin, as well as Jardine’s son, Matt, and a band. In an interview with NPR, band member Probyn Gregory described his initial reaction to Pet Sounds: “It was like he made manifest in an audio fashion what it was like to go from a teenage boy into a man. That’s part of what Pet Sounds is really about.”
Much of the beauty of the band’s early music is that the nostalgia doesn’t rely on real memory: You’ll be transported to a more innocent time anyway, whether it’s your first or fiftieth time listening to it. That’s what was so appealing about the Beach Boys in the Sixties—a decade of unrest and uncertainty—and that’s what remains so appealing, so fundamentally American, about the Beach Boys today.
Time is insidious, though, and Brian Wilson’s voice is no longer what it was. As he walked offstage for breaks during the performance, a crew member stepped out of the wings to support him as he stepped over the cords lining the stage. The crowd was not all, but mostly Baby Boomers. As Wilson played the opening chords to “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the crowd seemed palpably aware of being in the presence of a legend, a giant in the landscape of American music. But the Pet Sounds lyrics juxtaposed with his singing them was jarring: Brian Wilson was 17 going on 75. Here was a man who had seen the deaths of both of his younger brothers, had suffered crisis after crisis, singing the songs of a time when all of that was unknowable. Life seemed suddenly so short, the workings of time suddenly laid bare.
But then, after the Pet Sounds part of the concert ended with the haunting and wistful closing notes of “Caroline, No,” the band finished the performance by playing some of their earliest hits. “We’re both 74,” Al Jardine quipped near the beginning of the show. “But we’re still the Beach Boys.” And they were. “Barbara Ann” and “Help Me, Rhonda” filled the room, and all of the sudden, we were no longer in the staid and elegant Belk Theater. We were together in some beautiful elsewhere, full of hope and innocence. We were right there with Brian Wilson on the Ed Sullivan stage, basking in a future as bright as the California sun.
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Al amanecer, el mundo cantará de nuevo,
con una voz distante, acercando—
en la cima de las mareas
debajo del batir de las alas de golondrinas,
en un susurro, la voz serpenteará entre los juncos
con el viento, armonizando.
El mundo gira como un disco
bajo la aguja de tiempo.
Pero aquí, bañados en la luz lechosa de la luna,
existimos entre canciones,
en un silencio con arañazos.
In which I speculate about things much, much beyond the limits of my understanding.
In the multiverse, all things are true. Every possibility will happen, is happening, has already happened. In the blear of unreality following a nap, I want it all: I want to live in Charlotte and simultaneously live in Atlanta, in London, in Montevideo. I want to stay close to my family and simultaneously exist at the edges of the Earth, beyond reach. I want my relationship to last forever and simultaneously want a thousand other relationships. I want to inhabit the me of this universe and many others.
Schopenhauer theorized that the sum of the world’s phenomena is the product of a single metaphysical will. Universal principles of time and space don’t necessarily apply to other universes in the multiverse: It would be impossible to translate your consciousness from one to another. You couldn’t visit another universe; you couldn’t send a postcard back. Would Schopenhauer’s metaphysical will, unconscious and unseeing, extend across the otherwise uncrossable frontiers between universes? Are the universes themselves, with all their diverse phenomena, representations of the same will?
Thunder shakes the bed. Warm under the duvet, I wonder what it would mean to consciously inhabit the will of the multiverse, to be aware of every possibility unfolding at once. It’s impossible, even theoretically—an untenable recursive loop of will and consciousness. But in the melancholy late afternoon light, I unspool the impossibility.
I imagine a glimpse of the infinite being immediately lethal. Would it be worth the moment that kills you? The pain, the pleasure, the resulting, simultaneous insanity seems too much for any consciousness to contain. It’s hard to imagine being able to maintain both omniscience and existence. When confronted with omniscience, the existence must necessarily end, making omniscience an impossible state. But if one were the will, inseparable from the phenomena of the multiverse, ceasing to exist would mean everything else ceasing to exist, too. To know the infinite for an immeasurable moment would mean the end of it all.
The knowledge would be worthless. An unfathomable number of worlds would collapse into nothingness. Every conceivable and inconceivable possibility would become suddenly fruitless, and every barren universe would shrink out of existence, the last manifestation of a dying will. The absence of what was would converge to the size of a proton, containing infinite heat and mass—the raw debris of everything that could have been and, with enough energy, the raw materials of everything that could possibly be.
Charlotte, NC © 2016
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When South Asians immigrate to the United States, they conjure communities reminiscent of the ones they left. They build networks in an attempt to replicate the ones they had before, but the result is something altogether new. Imagined communities, they’re called. I wonder if we’re not all trying to conjure cultural communities out of an increasingly globalized and homogenized cultural landscape.
Are the places we perfectly belong always invisible to us, leaving us only acutely aware of the places where we don’t? Born and raised in the South, I never recognized it as a place I truly belonged: I was raised progressive, intellectual, and middle-class in the suburbs. W.J. Cash talked about how the South is inhospitable to academics, about how it’s a place where it’s difficult for anyone with an intellectual bent to belong. There is an unfortunate history of suicides among scholars of the South.
Only when I moved to Bangladesh to live and teach for a year did I begin to recognize the South as a place where I belonged. In Bangladesh, I was confronted with almost total exclusion. Linguistically, culturally, and aesthetically, I was faced for the first time with the totally foreign. I clung to the snatches of life there that I recognized from the South: the heat, the languor, the watermelons. In the absence of a community, I conjured the one I knew, embracing the parts I love, excluding the parts I never identified with. I cooked mashed potatoes and gravy, fried okra, and creamed corn. I read Eudora Welty and Gone with the Wind. I studied my own culture the way I’d studied Bangladesh’s before moving there. I dropped the g’s off of the ends of words and let my voice melt a little into a Southern accent I’d never had. I found in these things a place that I belonged, and I wondered if I was faking it, if it counted as my culture if I had to study and perform it.
Are all cultures in large part imagined communities? Aren’t they all studied and performed? What makes one an authentic member of a cultural community? The rap songs I listened to growing up instructed me how to perform that culture, even though when I left school, I drove twenty minutes and two bridges away from the physical communities associated with it. But just like my friends from those communities, I wore the proscribed clothes and shoes, knew the vocabulary, exchanged the cultural currency. Was that then my culture? Could I make an authentic claim to it? Or was I permanently excluded because that culture has developed in large part as a resistance to and in contrast to the culture of my ancestors? Can I claim aspects of black urban culture as my own or is my very claiming of it contributing to its dilution and commercialization?
A year after returning from Bangladesh, I started listening to country music kind of by accident. Bored of NPR and Top 40, I found country music to be only a short leap away from the bluegrass music I love. After an adolescence in which it was de rigeur to answer “what’s your favorite kind of music?” with “anything except country,” I was surprised to find that the genre wasn’t what I expected. The songs weren’t all about God, guns, and beer, although there was some of that. Instead they told stories and painted pictures that were romantic and spoke to a strong sense of place and identity, the same way rap music did. The more I listened to it, the more obvious it became that rap and country were two sides of the same coin. In country, one drove a truck, wore boots and cowboy hats, drank beer and whiskey, and grew up in the rural South. In rap, one drove a luxury car, wore Gucci and Air Forces, drank Hennessy and Bacardi, and grew up in the urban (often Southern) ghetto, no matter where one actually grew up (see: Kanye West). In each, a distinct culture is defined and its adherents instructed.
I am fascinated and compelled by nostalgia, and so is country music. The genre is built on a reminiscence of a past that perhaps never was and a present that is perhaps non-existent—an imagined community, in other words. I listen to the country music radio station in the city and wonder how many people listening know how to operate a tractor. In “Buy Me a Boat,” Chris Janson sings, “they call me redneck, white trash, and blue collar,” and, despite being from South Georgia (just like many country stars) and despite having much in common with them, I am the “they” Janson refers to. I am always that they. There is a venn diagram of they’s: the groups of people against whom so many are struggling for liberation, the majorities that minority groups define themselves against. I exist largely at the center of that Venn diagram, at the confluence of America’s past and present oppressions, the epitome of that they.
Can I be both? Can I identify with the country singers who sing about the places, experiences, food, and lifestyles that I know and love and also identify with the they, the people from the cities (like me) and the North, the academics who bemoan the conservatism and anti-intellectualism that’s rife in rural Southern communities? A quest for belonging implies a desire to belong to only one community, where all the boxes are checked, but in the end I, like everyone else, contain multitudes. I have an almost desperate desire to belong to a defined community, a specific cultural community that extends beyond my family and friends, but in this cultural moment, when there seems to be a pervasive, unspoken demand to get in a cultural identity box and stay in it, to be both or many, to live in the void between the boxes is an act of resistance and defiance. Is the price of that resistance to live without an elemental sense of cultural belonging?
The Bangladeshi-Americans that I met in Bangladesh must confront these questions constantly. Their cultural identities are public and apparent, while the struggles to reconcile them aren’t necessarily so. I only ever spoke with them about these struggles briefly and superficially, perhaps because they assumed I couldn’t relate. In some ways I can’t. Their challenges in defining and operating within their identities are different from mine in important and fundamental ways. But aren’t everyone’s? Are we all wandering in the void believing we’re alone?
Light & Paper 