Exposure has become an unrelenting source of exhaustion. It’s difficult to imagine how much more of ourselves there is to give. This isn’t a self-righteous urging to ‘log off.’ I think most of us feel exhausted, but are compelled to be on display regardless. Doesn’t it seem like attention, real attention from another human being, has become precious? Doesn’t it feel good when you can tell you’ve conveyed something true of yourself to another? When you’ve broken through the hedge maze of exposures and mutual projections and can sit together in a clearing, a little unburdened, even just for a moment?
There’s a nu-folksy dictum about success as inseparable from voluntary exposure. It’s false of course: these dead-end definitions of exposure and success. Fabrications, pitched to a weary public, of what it means to live a human life under modern conditions: the inevitability of growth, technology, democracy as an aesthetic. It would be difficult but not impossible to unshackle ourselves from physical and digital exposure, the data sediments that drag at our heels.
From Olivia Sudjic’s excellent little book/long essay, Exposure: “Constant surveillance is both exposure and confinement.”
I’d started this note a couple of weeks ago with some vague ideas about Jai Paul and how fandom weirdly ferments in an artist’s absence. It started as a nostalgic feeling, but as I began interrogating my own jackass sentences I uncovered a surprising sense of resentment about his impromptu emergence. I was envious of the way he fucked off for almost a decade after his music was stolen and uploaded online. I was loitering in his refusal, a withdrawing of consent to being surveilled and forcibly exposed. I don’t want to romanticize this, as many fans do, because it’s possible that the retreat was also a kind of confinement. What I am saying is that at the root of my weird fandom I found a smug and cozy little shack where Jai Paul was hostage (metaphorically!!) to my own dread about how tech and capital have ravaged our psyches in the last decade. Politically, that absence felt like a refusal to participate in the extractive ecosystem of the music industry; spiritually, it was ego death.
It’s like… if Jai Paul is back outside, what hope is there for the rest of us?
In his absence, Jai Paul’s visibility was buoyed by a projection: a collective fantasy of genius. I’m calling it fantasy and projection as an indictment of audience, inured to exposure and unable to comprehend why someone would retreat from reknown. I think about Lauryn Hill here, whose retreat from the spotlight was framed as madness — not genius. Both narratives emerge from a worldview where the only rational posture is to be exposed. And because genius is a uniquely male appelation and preoccupation, I’ve learned to distrust it. I sit instead with how Teyana Taylor is reckoning with the conditions of her labour and exposure, working under two of hip-hop’s appointed geniuses: “When ‘Fade’ came out, I was like ‘Who is this really for?’”
This also makes me think about an amazing 2022 doc called Rewind & Play, which uses archival footage of Thelonius Monk in Paris to demonstrate how extraction — forced, exploitative exposure — is foundational to the music industry. In it Monk responds to the cajoling of a white French journalist, who is desperate to be affirmed by the crew as expert and by Monk as down, with enduring, sweaty silence. We watch him sit there, quiet, as this white man constructs a story about Monk, in front of Monk. We witness Monk as prop, a projection; not a participant.
I think this narrative imperative, an outsourcing of the labour of extraction, has passed from entertainment industry to ‘music journalists’ (glorified publicists, yeah I said it) down to fans over the last half-century. In this context, stan behaviour can’t be reduced to personal dysfunction — it’s an extension of the dehumanization inherent to the music industry. We demand exposure, and reward it with virality. Refusal is reconsituted as genius, crazy, difficult, erratic, weird, (brave only if you’re Taylor Swift) by an industry that where exposure is fodder for discourse.
Refusal scares the shit out of people. “No!” is a baby uttering its first threat. I want to refuse, to disappear, but instead I sublimate that desire into a narrative about Jai Paul’s absence. By re-emerging and asserting his agency, he’s unsettling an accumulation of projections that have piled up in his absence. And I’m simply a consumer listening to the voices in my head and spinning a narrative. Kinda makes me sick, but I’m glad I looked closer at it because it’s a reminder — always needed — of how unreliable human faculties are for experiencing art.
Here’s how Sri Lanka-born philosopher Ananda K. Coomaraswamy put it, writing in 1917: “The singer is still a magician, and the song is a ritual, a sacred ceremony, an ordeal which is designed to set at rest that wheel of the imagination and the senses which alone hinder us from contact with reality. But to achieve this ordeal the sycophant must cooperate with the musician by the surrender of the will, and by drawing in his restless thought to a single point of concentration: this is not the time or place for curiosity or admiration.”
In less speculative fuckery:
For those following the Writer’s Guild of America strike, the Strikegeist newsletter is a useful resource for news + analysis of what’s to come.
In the Spring 2023 issue of Maisonneuve I advocate to be existentially freed from the media industry’s cycles of death discourse. Let it die :)
Really loved this a lot. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the idea of seclusion can sometimes misrepresent an artist’s capabilities in relation to Frank Ocean and Coachella. This is a fantastic parallel with Jai Paul.