Last night I posted a live video of Minnie Ripperton doing “Loving You”. This track, by Terre Thaemlitz, is called “Between Empathy and Sympathy Is Time (Apartheid)”, and it’s from his album Lovebomb.
Thaemlitz, in addition to making music, also writes about politics and culture. This is an excerpt from his liner notes for Lovebomb, which is a concept album about “love” as a social construct:
Love - no matter how inexplicably mentally consuming - is not so much an emotion as an equation of contextually specific cultural variables. Whether it is the acknowledged caress of hands between a man and woman in public, or the unacknowledged punch of fists behind closed doors, both patterns coexist in countless accepted systems of chaotic imbalances. A key element of love is the justification of violence. The simple fact is most violence comes from people we know. We internalise the flight-inspiring family relation, unable to explain the love that binds. “Surely that is not love!” you say… but look deep and consider yourself fortunate if you find no scars of emotional or physical violence associated with those you love(d), either in reception or infliction, advertent or inadvertent. Ask yourself, in what ways do the social relations of “family” or “lovers” facilitate behaviors that are unacceptable in other environments? Certain social relations presume the presence of love, and it is that love which enables us to overlook the oppressions of the pleasant neighbors who beat their spouses, the parents who beat their children, or the priests who molest their congregations. In the end, post-Industrial love is just another ideological device facilitating a division between “public” and “private” space, and is complicit with such a division’s basis in inequality and exclusion. The very process of finding a partner itself is not so much a quest for the right person as an exclusion of the multitudes.
So yeah, not exactly a fun guy, at least on paper, but the conceptual aspect of Thaemlitz’s work, and the way it is informed by his interest in theory (his writings in this realm, I freely admit, I don’t always understand), has led to music with a lot of layers.
This track takes sound effects and a speech from Radio Freedom and runs it through a harmonizer keyed into the “Loving You” chord progression. Such an elegant effect, leading to a song that is eerie, frightening, disorienting, unbearably sad, and, ultimately, enlightening—political art of the very best kind.
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