“Partying, Partying,” she sings, in hollow mantra.
“Yeah!” an unseen mass replies, a Pavlovian affirmation.
***
“The crying tires, the busting glass, the painful scream that I heard last…” sang J. Wilson and the Cavaliers, when pop still admitted technology's collusion with death. But that time is gone. For Rebecca Black there is only graphic effect, materialist schizobabble, “I got this, You got this…” she sings over and again, citizen as gaping appetite, grammarless and hungry.
***
And then arrives at a house party, a place absent of authority, the aim of Friday night.
“Partying, Partying,’” she sings again, now in detached self-narration.
“Yeah!” reply her friends, and then the sequence is repeated to evoke the grand progenitor of all American music, the call and response of a Negro spiritual, harkening back to our nation's great unhealing wound, slavery itself. |
