Carly Rae Jepsen – “E•MO•TION”
There is more than one way to cover a temple in platinum. Maybe we both long for an era when there were less things to record death. In the interview, they asked if you believe in love at first sight. You said I think I have to. You didn’t say we are all one hard storm away from dissolving, vanishing into the frenzied dusk. But I get it. I know what it is to walk into the mouth of an unfamiliar morning and feel everything. I touch hands with a stranger who gives me my change at the market, and I already know their history. I suppose this is survival. I will love those who no one else thinks to remember. This is all that is promised: there will be a decade you are born, and a decade that you will not make it out of alive. All of the rooftops where the parties were in the year of my becoming are now dust. No one dances so close to the sky anymore. I say I, too, am a romantic, and I mean I never expected to survive this long. I have infinite skin. I keep dry when the rain comes. There will always be another era of bright suits that don’t quite fit, but must. There will always be a year where the cameras are hungry for whatever sins we can strangle out of the night. There will always be another spoon for boys to lick the sugar from.
-Hanif Abdurraqib (I found it here alongside a poem about The Four Seasons)
I think that Hanif Abdurraqib really understands what music means to people, how songs become married to memories and how music mirrors us (I also think he has maybe listened to every song that has ever been written??). In a piece that he wrote about Carly Rae Jepsen in 2017, he says something that I think sums up both the album Emotion and this poem very well:
You can’t feel everything all at once, until you can…And in Carly Rae Jepsen’s fleeting, brilliant world, it feels like there is nothing outside that might try to steal what joy you’ve managed to accumulate, in spite of the odds.”
In this poem, feeling is survival, even though survival is something so often associated with holding back feeling. I think Emotion not only describes but demands bursts of feeling (obviously, that is why the album is called Emotion). I think of CRJ’s music as the moment when you want to cry but you dance it out instead. Also, anything about touching hands with a stranger gets to me these days, since now I mostly associate that kind of moment with fear rather than with connection, and that is a huge bummer. In this same piece, Abdurraqib says that Emotion’s “primary characters are desire and distance.” I hope we all get to touch hands again soon.
xo
sam