Raw Thoughts 3.27.25- Passionfruit

“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”- Tony Soprano

In the early winter of 2017 I bought a pair of Doc Martens. 1461s. The classic black ones. They were a pain in the ass to break in. They didn't even feel like real leather at first. By the time they softened up the back of the sole had already worn through for the most part. That was four months later. I'd say that sums up the year pretty well for me.

The first Trump win was the culmination of a sense of false progress that permeated the air. I had just gotten a promotion at my job, but my reward was making it to 15 dollars an hour, which is what Bernie Sanders was campaigning on for a national minimum wage, and which is lower than the current minimum wage in New York City. They had recently expanded to a second store which focused on things very much within my wheelhouse. I had absolutely no say in it even though I gave plenty of suggestions for stuff for them to carry. I had found some sort of outlet for my frustrations through bootlegging Logic Pro the year before and making music under the name of a Tumblr which has been long dead. Those frustrations went by the name of suicidal ideation and that music only really got heard by other fellow maladroit miscreants in random Discords. Everyone needs a private villa to themselves even if it's online. We were all going through this push and pull. People would transition and still feel the call to transition because of new ennui and animus. People would uproot their lives in search of a fresh start only to see all of their baggage piled up in their new apartment. Shared troubles and tribulations created strong bonds. In my case the line between trauma bonding and infatuation began to blur, if it even really existed.

All of this ran through my head as I perused the jeans rack at the Topman by Rockefeller Center, looking for affordable raw denim. As I searched for something with a 34 inseam invariably the same five words would be blared over the speakers:

"Listen, seeing you got ritualistic"

A Topshop three months from closure in the mid-to-late 2010s is the platonic ideal in terms of places to experience a Drake song. For all of his talk of the Missoni room and Loro Piana and Brioni, his mission was omnipresence. After the allegations of ghostwriting that arose from the Meek Mill beef, his only option was to become inevitable. Every station, every genre, every accent and dialect had to have his involvement. This became literal upon the release of Scorpion in 2018, when Spotify put his face on the flash screen for every single genre(including shoegaze and J-Pop).

Inevitability creates paradoxes. You must be interesting and clever enough to create intrigue and novelty yet at the same time you must be digestible enough that anyone can give you a chance without moving too far out of their comfort zone. Even still after accomplishing this you need to do this at a consistent pace because the machine demands more porridge. Slop is nothing, just filler. Porridge possesses enough of a veneer of nutrition and flavor to at least seem worthwhile. For three years, Drake was Quaker Fuckin’ Oats. He made grits, he made atole, he made polenta, he made congee, he made farina. He was the porridge man for the world and the world loved him for it.

If the 2020s are defined by slop, the decade previous was the era of porridge. Particularly the first Trump term. The downward mobility foretold by the Bush and Obama era Great Recession had simply become a fact of life, yet at the same time zero interest rates had led Silicon Valley to move into ventures that proved more and more spurious as time went on. Overnight all sorts of new ridesharing and delivery services and marketplaces and random publications popped up and supposedly there was enough money to subsidize them all. Especially prominent in this short era was the direct-to-consumer brand.

Right now, I am looking at the websites for Herman Miller and Vitra, specifically because those two companies hold the rights to officially produce the works of Charles and Ray Eames. The classic catcher’s mitt style Eames Lounge Chair starts at $6895.00 on Herman Miller’s website. In Europe, where Vitra holds the rights to that specific design(and a reputation for better leather and wood quality), the Eames Lounge Chair starts at €7250.

The high costs of these items have to be taken in context. The goal of the Eameses was to design furniture that would be heirloom quality yet accessible to the public, in production if not necessary cost. A fifteen hundred dollar coffee table is expensive, but compared to a handcrafted fifteen thousand dollar coffee table it’s downright reasonable. This principle got rerocked through the decades until we arrived in the mid 2010s, where some VC fresh off a round of sous viding ego death through microdosing would give you a few rounds(of funding! Ayo!) for launching a DTC brand that promised Theory quality at Zara prices. If you were lucky enough you would be able to open a few brick and mortar locations to prove you were a real clothing line or luggage line or makeup brand or whichever market you were primed to disrupt by cutting the -dleman away from the mid.

Although elder to middle of the curve millennials were downwardly mobile(myself definitely included) there were still enough blessed enough to find their way into positions made possible through these aforementioned zero interest rates to form a lucrative market base worth catering to. Thus the world was introduced to Away, which provided “luxury” luggage and bags that were maybe two-thirds as good as say, a Rimowa, but at a third of Rimowa’s cost. Or Everlane, which provides elevated and minimalistic basics much like the vaunted French label APC, but at two-fifths of the cost and one-fifth of the cool. Remember, these are essentials. These are not clothes that you wear into nor do they wear you. Just efficient clothing that allow you to be an efficient person as you live an efficient life eating efficient bowls of food.

The illusion sold was that that of starter luxury. Although these were basic items, they were of such quality that they would be ideal stepping stones to your future richer life. Of course many brands, such as Coach, have epitomized this notion for decades but the DTC boom and the now-dead Topshop were the last hurrah. Your new better life was about to begin and then-

Which brings us to the beat. The most noticeable thing about Passionfruit musically is that the beat never actually begins. You have a simple, almost hypnotic set of chords that sounds like it's going to build up to something and then it just goes back to the beginning, broken up only by a Moodymann sample at the beginning. Its calmness, or assumed calmness, belies the regret behind the song, almost like a tropical "Hey Ya".

The first words are the aforementioned "Listen, seeing you got ritualistic", which fit like a glove. The beat itself is almost ritualistic, as if playing this progression over and over again will keep this relationship intact, or that you keep going through the same ritual over and over again with different people but to no avail. No matter which direction you move in you never really move forward just horizontally.

He follows up with "Cleansing my soul of addiction for now, cause I'm falling apart." which plays into the theme of not being able to move forward. Addiction is cyclical. You try to break the cycle then something happens and you come back. Or you kick it but replace it with something else that consumes you and once again your back to square one. Time has passed but you look around and although the players might have changed, the clothes might have gotten looser or tighter and the setting might be a bit colder or warmer the story is more or less the same.

A perfect sentiment the time it was released in and one that would become more true as we dragged our way into the 2020s. This was an era where we had finally began to come to terms with our lowered expectations. Obama, perhaps the biggest carny in American history to not be involved in pro wrestling, had proven to be an empty suit at the beck and call of the new oligarch class of Silicon Valley. Any hope of progress in terms of racial inequality and wealth inequality had vanished by the time he condemned the protests against Freddie Grey, which came after a wave of high profile murders and coverups involving local police departments, including his former chief of staff presiding over a black site used for torture while serving as mayor of Chicago.

At the same time, the online media space was devoted to the thinkpiece. The thinkpiece was perhaps the epitome of porridge. The previous decade had given birth to the blogosphere where on platforms such as Blogspot, Livejournal and later Tumblr, regular people built followings talking about either their everyday lives or their opinions on politics or pop culture. A lot of these blogs served as auditions for spots at Vice(which was going through its post Gavin McInnes rebrand as an edgy, take no prisoners voice for the US State Department) or Buzzfeed. Or surprisingly Teen Vogue, which had a short run as a prominent "serious publication". Or Cracked, which started as a ripoff of MAD Magazine and pivoted into more sincere sounding fare. Or any of the two or three Joshua Topolsky vehicles that served as a repository for decent to good journalism and a source of clearance Aeron chairs once the funding inevitably dried up.

Most of these were kinda smart but kinda not. The term "problematic" came up a lot. A lot of pieces about how Girls didn't have enough minorities(without asking real questions like how shows with primarily black casts were legitimate mainstream pop culture ten years previous but became kind of siloed off into a niche) or explaining terms like "fuccboi"(formerly fuckboy) and "woke"(which has completely changed meaning). The term privilege got introduced and then extrapolated past its usefulness because nothing was built on that foundation.

Of course Drake figured heavily into this economy. This was a big part of his omnipresence at the time. He was at once a beacon for sensitive masculinity, a sadboy misogynistic manipulator(see the response to Hotline Bling), a cultural appropriator(see One Dance and Controlla) and a walking meme. In 2013 Vice devoted their entire site to the release of Nothing Was The Same and had heavy hitters such as The Kid Mero and formerly funny meme account Seinfeld2000 review a song. Seinfeld2000's review of The Language was just "KRAME SAY N WORD". But a year after the Meek beef, the afterglow of victory had worn off and he was being called out(rightfully so in a lot of ways) as a manipulator by sites that spoon-fed entry level feminist concepts to male manipulators smart enough to put Carly Ray Jensen in their Spotify next to Drake. So it goes.

The chorus of "Passionate from miles away, passive with the things you say, passin up on my old ways, I can't blame you, no, no" works beautifully. One of the main criticisms most people, myself included, have of Drake is that he doesn't have that much range as a vocalist. I can't call him great or terrible he's in the competent to passable range. He can't really "go there" as they say, in the way that fellow singer/rapper/actor hybrid Childish Gambino can(which I discuss in my piece on Earth: The Oldest Computer). But Drake's limitations as a vocalist actually add weight to the chorus. This is a man who wants to be passionate but the distance makes it hard to. He's wondering if it's really even worth the effort. The same goes for her. No matter what you might want or think you have how can you not be passive with that much between you? Do you even really know each other enough to truly be that passionate? In this regard the notion of "voice as an instrument" goes the other way.

Even the repetition of "pass", as in "passionate", "passive with", "passin on" is inspired. Much has been made of his ability to merge rap and r&b post-Take Care but this couplet is the quintessential example of such.

Distance is a huge theme in this song. Appropriate for the era of peak social media and internet jobs. Thanks to specifically Tumblr and Twitter it became easier than ever to make connections with people. The aforementioned zero interest rates incentivized cites all across America to lure in startups and the young creatives required to staff them. Thus you had thousands moving from Pittsburgh to New York to Denver to Nashville to Austin and so on. The urban gentrified monoculture referred to derisively as slop began to take shape during this period, or at least as much shape as slop can take.

But by design no matter how close you can theoretically get to someone on a fly out or on social media or even the old school forums that social media replaced, there is always distance.

There will always be "tension between us like picket fences", as Drake put it. You only have but so much of this person. You're only able to see one of the faces that they show the world, whether you're a globetrotting superstar who happens to see them while passing through their city or a mufo or a long distance partner who became so because the startup you work for decided to move to Columbus or wherever for for tax breaks. It truly is "harder building trust from a distance". Is it really worth opening yourself up to a person you barely get the chance to see or that you really have to make time to talk to? Or do you just try to keep it light so that you don't end up screaming into a void? This is a world where we're more connected than ever but at the same time more dejected than ever. Static signals abound trying to make them harmonize.

Before his descent, Drake was golden as a porridge purveyor. This song is pretty simple at its core, kind of a basic tropical-inflected dance song but at its core he was really able to tap into something real. Almost a Brill Building-esque quality about him as a songsmith. And given that the only credits on this are him and the producer(much like Der Yeezengrupenfuhrer he's generous with credits. Quentin Miller got credits, OVO Hush got credits) I'm counting this as one of his triumphs.

The true genius of a song about being trapped in cycles and which captures being trapped in the same patterns over and over? If you listen to it on repeat, which I have, numerous times, it loops perfectly.