The universe can be a scary place when Valentine's Day falls on a Friday. Regular, everyday Friday thirstiness aligns with the once-a-year desperation of people in and out of relationships feeling the crushing burden of expectancy with which St. Valentine damned us all and creates an amorous eclipse that can drive damn-near every person goddamn insane.
People respond in a couple different ways. Some shut it down, loudly cursing the holiday and its place in society, the cultural implications of it ubiquity, and the mental acumen of those who allow themselves to be duped by a greeting card-commercial holiday.
Others surrender to it. If they're in relationships, they celebrate them to the fullest, hit every ritualistic touchstone from chocolate to flowers to the intimate dinner for two. If they aren't, they mourn, bask in their loneliness, and redouble their efforts in the pursuit of romantic fulfillment.
But you know what every one of those people do on Valentine's Day, ESPECIALLY when it falls on a Friday?
They get drunk.
You know who knew that? You know who was ready to pounce on people's fragility on the most questionable holiday this side of Columbus Day and Evacuation Day?
Beyonce.
The Superwoman must have decided that this was her weekend to get us all drunk off her good-good, because we weren't just given one remixed shot of the most brazenly raunchy single of her career, we were given rounds and rounds of them. So many that things got a little blurry.
It started on Thursday, the day before the Whitman's chocolate started flowing like water, when Neil “Detail” Fisher, the original producer of Drunk In Love, unveiled his “official” remix to Complex.
Drunken Love is a dramatic take. It doesn't build its drunkenness the way original does, where we spiral into irresponsible decisions along the ride with Beyonce, it's more of a hungover memory of a night. It's an echo; atmospheric but unspecific. The remix sounds good, but it is much more of a compliment to the original than a replacement. It's interesting but inessential.
Late Friday night, another remix surfaced, this time with Watch The Throne-in law Kanye West giving it the Yeezus treatment.
I can promise you that I have more opinions on Kanye West and Yeezus than you care to hear. Maybe someday. The important note for here, though, is that Yeezus is a hell of a caricature, representative of a very publicly exploratory phase in Kanye's career.
The natural comparison to draw here is to Kanye's verse on the remix of Rihanna's Diamonds, since that was the last time Kanye guested on a top song he was uninvolved with until after it was already its own phenomenon.
Over the last year, people have often said they miss the “old Kanye,” who was introspective and playful and whose combativeness was less pervasive, but I've always felt that his contribution on this song, talking about Fresh Prince, Back to the Future, and The Louvre along with his demons and insecurity, proved it was all a ploy, since here he was his doing everything short of donning the old Dropout Bear costume. On his Yeezus tour, he does this verse as part of his final, maskless sequence, along with Jesus Walks, All The Lights, The Good Life and Bound 2, as if to tacitly acknowledge that he knows how to give fans that uplifting and inclusive “good Kanye,” but is only willing to do so on his own very specific terms.
The Diamonds verse reads like the only time Kanye's spit with explicit literalness in the last two years, a sharp contrast to the darkly fragmented and elusive Yeezus persona. “Voices in my head/ 'I need choices in my bed'/ Aaaagh!/ Get out my fuckin' head!” That conflicted sentiment is basically the entire thrust of the Yeezus album, tidily packed into someone else's song so that on his own work he's not over-explaining things.
Kanye's verse on Drunk In Love feels like a coda to the Yeezus persona. He's filthy-talking baby-mamma Kim Kardashian, but none of the conflictedness that ran so rampant through the Yeezus album is left. What's more, he's tipping his hand, whether by using the “Ooh” sample from I'm In It as a substitute for saying what he's, um, in, or putting her on that bike (bound, girl); he's just riffing on how much fun he's having when sleeping with Kim, putting a bow on it, saying the Yeezus monster has been fed. He's not actually mad.
Drunk In Love is about how, when those two states are in concert, the universe is made up of only two people, and the importance of everything else melts away. When Yeezus debuted, there was a lot of talk about Kanye's commitment to Kim, and a lot of hay was made about many of the songs' implications. This verse makes it pretty clear that the album was all about he and Kim, all for her, but also that if Kanye hadn't explored his doubts before they'd had a baby, it would have made for pretty boring music.
Because while it's a fun verse and an interesting inversion on the beat, aside from the Flashing Lights drop, Kanye's Drunk In Love remix is kind of boring. Maybe because Kim isn't altogether that interesting (granted, unless you're having sex with her). I think I like the idea of it as a Yeezus coda because I'm so interested in what comes from Kanye next, once he puts away the diamond masks and starts to process all the animosity he actively pursued over his Yeezus year. His relationship with his girl is pretty neatly squared away, now he can go back to working on his relationship with America. Which, last time he did that, birthed the opulent My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
I told you I had more to say about Kanye than you were ready for. But that wasn't it for the weekend, because late Saturday, on his birthday, The Weeknd also got involved with all the drunken loveyness.
He labeled it a remix, but it's really something closer to a cover, or a reimagining. Not too much is done to the beat, but Weeknd has taken over the singing duties from Beyonce (the gall!). But he's not just singing her song, he's transforming it into the sort of dystopian, paranoid aural landscape he's made his trademark.
This song was inspired by Beyonce's, but his lyrics create a pretty seismic gap between her get-me-off-I'll-get-you-off pathos and his get-me-off-don't-expect-to-hear-back-from-me-ness. Which, again, is pretty in keeping with Mr. Kiss Land, whose biggest driving creative questions generally seem to circle around the shortcomings of intimacy as a solution to feelings isolation and loneliness. It might have been a little more intellectually honest if he'd called it Drunken Lust, or Drunk In Love With Myself, because there's very little to indicate any sort of even cursory interest in mutuality.
So it might be, like, thematically deplorable?, but like so many Weeknd songs, it sounds very, very good. It's expansive and, probably, honest, because, like, why would he say he wouldn't call a girl unless she gave good head unless he meant it? Not a ton of upside there in admitting that one.
There were at least a few other Drunk In Love remixes that came out over the Valentimes weekend, but those were the ones that most crossed into my interest-stream. Was it a weekend filled with a greater than usual number of instances of waking up in the kitchen asking “how the hell did this shit happen?” Oh, maybe.
Everything about how we feel on February 14th of every year is pretty unmistakably arbitrary. It's not better to have love on that day than it is on August 14th. But in an era where we hold tighter onto the things we experience universally and simultaneously, like live sports and award shows and unexpected album releases, there's something reassuring about the knowledge that it is a weekend of shared feelings, be they contended ones or anxieties. Or vices. We have all these incongruous data streams in our lives, some from artists, some from friends and family, some from highly-targeted corporate interests. When they streamline into singular focus, the effect is powerful. Things like Valentimes and Beyonce remixes become impossible to avoid.
It seems like a weekend of an awful lot of trying. People trying to be happy, trying to be loved, trying to be heard, recognized, validated.
People are chasing that feeling, that something, whether they're rubbing beautiful bodies, hitting the club, or hitting refresh on Facebook as they web surf, bored.
[Surf bored]
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