Wherever you're going

My mother had just turned 21 when she gave birth to me. She hadn't had much time to build her own world around her - not enough time, I think - before she needed to look after me too. But some inner landmarks were already in place. She was ten years old when Breakfast at Tiffany's came out in 1961. I don't know what, but I know it meant something to her. She used to sing Moon River to me, in the dim light coming from the hallway, sitting next to my bed when I was going to sleep. And because of this, the song means something to me, well beyond its place in the culture, beyond even its own indisputable loveliness and power. I've always liked the Andy Williams recording, but it's never felt like the definitive version. That is my mum's voice, singing gentle and low, seldom in tune, listening in silence for the studio orchestra playing in her head to carry her to the cue for the next line. The two drifters off to see the world were her and me, I knew. Her singing drew us into a private intimacy, spinning slowly down the darkened river, on a current that was all the stronger for being only felt here and nowhere else in our life.

Frank Ocean's Moon River was released on Valentine's Day. That's interesting, because what he's made is overwhelmingly beautiful - 'lush', 'swooning', all those words - and it's not a romantic song about how lovers feel for each other. What is it? I think it's about the same thing my mother made the song be about: singing across the generations to a loved one who's just beginning the adventure, singing and being carried on the gentle, deep, relentless waters, singing about seeking what's always going to be just around the bend. It's a lullaby and a promise, it's stillness poised over motion, it's full of knowledge about and acceptance of desire and restraint.

When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.

That's Umberto Eco, in a classic piece of thinking about semiotics that's itself become a minor cult object / cliche. He's talking about Casablanca, and the argument he's ultimately making is that the sublimity he glimpses in the movie is the product of 'something [that] has spoken in place of the director'. The context is The Death Of The Author, il n'y a pas de hors-texte, all the rest of it - high postmodernism, mid-eighties, a couple of years before Frank Ocean's birth in 1987.

When I fall in love with a work of art I want to be able to explain to myself what that artwork is. Almost the first thing I could articulate about this Moon River is that it's almost impossible to sing along with. You want to (well, I want to) but you can't. Try it. And it should be easy, because it sounds so clean. It's just bass and voice. The bass is so simple and steady and true - it changes over the course of the song from guitar to synth, and it rises and diffuses out into a sound that's like birdsong and water. But the voice....is it one voice, or many? The freaky chipmunked opening, all those multitracked vocals moving in and out of phase, harmony, unison; the consistent swerving of the lyrics slightly but significantly away from the 'original', often with different words layered over each other:

oh dream maker, {my heart/you heart breaker}
wherever you're going I'm going {that way/the same}
two drifters off to see the world, {it's / there's} such a crazy world, you'll see
we're all chasin' after our same, chasin' after our aims
Moon River, wider than a mile, crossin' in style someday 

life's just around the bend, my friend

Listened to through headphones, it's so weirdly and beautifully intimate: where else but inside your own skull do you ever hear a chorus of the same voice, all speaking differently, doubled and orchestrated, obviously manipulated but at the same time, rich and rough with the irreplaceable sound of a human being, loaded with feeling, stretching in a single syllable from exaltation to grief. The cliches are talking amongst themselves: but this assemblage couldn't be further from the authorless, self-animated, almost accidental product of a textual system that Eco talked about. The artist is present in this song in a way that is not really like much else that I know about. I don't know a lot of contemporary pop music in a deep way and I'm not in a position to make a grandiose claim about innovation or originality even if I was into that sort of thing. What I am saying is that *I* don't know of anything quite like this, and I love it.