It's difficult to be motivated all the time. Honestly, I think it's difficult to be motivated most of the time. I often hear the term self-motivation, and simply can't seem to grasp what exactly it is, or how it could truly be a reality.
This past fall I worked in direct sales for a privately owned dealer of a major brand home security system. Cold calling. Door to door. It was emotionally brutal. Rejection after rejection. Occasionally I would win someone over at the door. They would be convinced enough of my authenticity and the legitimacy of my “free promotion” that they would invite me inside and eventually provide me, an “Advertising Representative,” with their Social Security number (for credit check purposes), their banking info (EFT for the monthly payment), and a check for the $99.00 activation fee. This was no small feat, and I would have never made a sale if it had not been for my wingman, an older friend who got me the job and then helped train me.
Each morning I would show up for a sales meeting (read: pep rally) at the company “office,” an unbelievably depressing building they were leasing that appeared to have once been a fast food restaurant, maybe a Taco Bell. My boss (and sometimes his boss) would stand in front of the group of washed-up former used car salesmen, out of work contractors, and drifting philosophy majors (the last category included only my friend and me), and spew catch phrases like “fake it till you make it!” and “people's fear of loss is greater than their anticipation of gain!” (At the end of the meeting he would ask, “What are we gonna do today?!” and we were to respond with “Help people! Have fun! Make money!” My friend said it reminded him of being in the Marines where they would respond with “Kill! Kill! Kill!”.
Anyway, at one of the meetings (my last one actually) I looked at the co-worker sitting next to me; he seemed to be taking notes on the pep talk. He was actually just manically writing over and over on his page, “YOU HAVE TO WORK YOU HAVE TO WORK YOU HAVE TO WORK YOU HAVE TO WORK...” It's hard to describe the oppressive horror and ironic hilarity of the situation. This kid couldn't have been more than 25, may have done some college. I would assume his personal aspirations, at least his career aspirations, were higher than what he was doing right now. I like to think that was true of everyone there. But many of them were just demotivated people who needed to make money. (Funny how people lacking in motivation would choose to be in sales).
I know an IT guy who is originally from the slums of India. He moved to the states to go to college when he was young. He has lived in 18 different countries, knows four or five languages, and is well accomplished in his field. From talking to him, I get the impression that the only obstacles he sees or considers in the world are external, much greater obstacles than I have ever had to face: severe lack of money, education, not being in geographic proximity to good opportunities, etc. In my world (the western middle class) all the obstacles seem internal: lack of self-discipline, demotivation, perfectionism, fear of failure, taking self too seriously, etc.
These obstacles seem invalid and petty compared to great physical obstacles such as spoken language and availability of education, but they are real to me and—as I am noticing—most of my generation. We are being called the “entitlement” generation by the working world, and appropriately. We are, in many ways, the most privileged generation in the history of the world and we have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I don't think this is coincidental.
This topic could use some elaborating, but I'm out of motivation.
If you surf the FM radio within roughly 60 miles of almost any major city it will not be too long before you will hear Usher's hit song “Love In This Club (feat. Young Jeezy).” While the hip-hop/pop favorite is not in as extremely heavy rotation as it was at other times in the past year, it is definitely still a staple on the airwaves. I would guess that many of you have heard it – and many of you have switched stations or turned the radio off, mourning the days of “good” music. This song is actually really “good” music, but there is a lot to unpack.
But this post is about “Love In This Club,” Usher's eighth number one single. The incredibly infectious and memorable 1 5 6 4 chord progression is played throughout the song on a synthesizer while a piano seems to follow with 8th or 16th note arpeggios of each chord. Throw this over a kickin' hip-hop beat and you have a major pop hit. Definitely not the most inventive song, but well arranged and produced nonetheless.
I'm going to do a step by step analysis of the song following the lyrics. While it would be immensely fun to apply Freud and the whole male/female, viewer/viewed dynamic of film and art to this song, I'm going to try to keep it simple. Instead of listening to the song in the role of the female character in Usher's club world (This would mean Usher singing to me, wooing me, wanting to make love with me. Not me, Christopher per say, but me the person in the shoes of the imaginary female in the song.), I chose to listen from the perspective of a non-participating third-person voyeur (which is how we listen to songs 99% percent of the time) who has never heard the song before.
For this to make the most sense you will need to hear the song. You can stream it here http://thenotes.tumblr.com/post/94587275/usher-ft-young-jeezy-love-in-this-club.
Here goes. (Lyrics in bold)
Spoken: “Gotta do it for the ladies, And I gotta keep it hood, Where we at Polo? Aye”
Typical opening babble, creates some hip-hop atmosphere, establishes Usher's attitude.
"You say you searchin' for somebody
That'll take you out and do you right
Well, come here, baby
And let daddy show you what it feel like"
Tell me what you sippin' on
And I promise that I'm gonna keep it comin'
All night long”
“Lookin' in your eyes while you on the other side
And I think that shorty I've got a thing for you, yeah
Doin' it on purpose, windin' and workin' it
I can tell by the way you lookin' at me, girl”
So they're making a connection, making eyes. Flirting, dancing around the obvious attraction. Alright so far.
"I wanna make love in this club, yea
in this club, yea, in this club, yea, in this club
I wanna make love in this club, yea
in this club, yea, in this club, yea, in this club"
Woah. Okay. There it is. Rather obvious, but still the phrase “make love.” I'm not personally feeling the romance, but it's conceivable. “Make love” sound emotional and spiritual, not just carnal. I picture candles, maybe soft music. Then again they are in a club (noisy, smelly, crowded), but still it's plausible. At least I get the feeling Usher means it to be legitimately romantic.
“I see you got some friends rollin' with you
Baby, then that's cool
You can leave them with my homies
Let 'em know that I got you
If you didn't know
You're the only thing that's on my mind
'Cause the way I'm starin' at you
Got me wantin' to give it to you all night
Lookin' in your eyes while you on the other side
I can't take it no more
Baby, I'm comin' for you
You keep doin' it on purpose windin' and workin' it
If we close our eyes it could be just me and you”
“Let's go!
I'm what you want, I'm what you need
He got you trapped, I'll set you free
Sexually, mentally, physically, emotionally
I'll be like your medicine, you'll take every dose of me
It's goin' down on aisle 3
I'll bag you like some groceries
And every time you think about it
You gon' want some more of me
About to hit the club
Make a movie, yeah rated R
Pulled up like a trap star
That's if you have yo' regular car
You ever made love to a thug
In the club with his sights on
'87 jeans
And a fresh pair of Nike's on
On the couch, on the table
On the bar or on the floor
You can meet me in the bathroom
Yeah, you know I'm tryin' go”
Holy cow! This is for real! "Bag you like some groceries?" Every one of my worst fears about this song is coming true. Usher somehow still has his hands clean (after all it's this guest rapper who is really getting dirty), but the vibe is completely ruined. It's not like Usher had concocted much of a convincing fine dining experience, but Young Jeezy showed up to the banquet like a kid from McDonald's and shoved his face in the Bavarian creme pie!
Then it's back to Usher singing as smooth as ever – as if nothing has changed.
“Might as well give me a kiss
If we keep touchin' like this
I know you scared baby
They don't know what we doin'
Keep it up girl then I swear
I'mma give it to you non stop
And I don't care who's watchin'
Watchin', watchin'
Watchin', watchin', ohh
In this club, on the floor
Baby's let's make love”
Then a final chorus.
Wow. What an experience.
This phrase is cliché. It’s on bumper stickers and t-shirts, and people read it everyday without any proper context. Similar to the “Life is good” slogan, it can come across as trite and insensitive to the human condition. Picture a woman who finds out, shortly after her son dies in war, that she has terminal cancer. While driving home from the doctor appointment she sees a “Life is good” sticker on someone’s car. “I know. And it’s being taken from me!” may be one of the things that goes through her mind. She might read “Jesus loves you” on a sticker and think, “Great. Where is He now?”
On a smaller scale, even as a believer and follower of Jesus (who is apparently my “homeboy” now as well as my savior), I often feel a frustration when I read “Jesus loves you.” This is because the concept—the truth—it is trying to communicate is usually missed and almost completely held back by the unusual context in which it appears. Also, the name Jesus has been severely bastardized.
Let me try to explain. I’m pretty sure that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is a brilliant painting, but I wouldn’t know from experience. Even if I saw it in person I doubt it would impress me. It’s on postcards, postage stamps, in textbooks, floating all over the internet. Almost everyone has seen it, and it has no magic left. When I look at the painting, instead of sensing an aura of mystery surrounding the subject’s smile, my mind is overwhelmed with foreign thoughts and connotations - Dan Brown’s book perhaps, an awareness that I am only viewing a duplicate and not the original, or maybe thoughts about problems in academia and the art world. The Mona Lisa has lost its meaning, and it certainly can’t be expected to make an impression on people simply because they are told it is a brilliant painting. They have to experience it themselves.
If Jesus is just a good man, a white hippie-looking prophet with a weak and passive expression on His face, and you’re told that he “loves” you (let’s not forget that we “love” pizza, “love” that phone, “love” that song, “love” siblings and parents – who we don’t actually like very much), how can you not feel a painful disconnect?
In addition, Jesus is often viewed as the cop. “Would you do that if Jesus was watching?” This is the kind of phrase that makes kids swim in guilt and want to rebel further. Here Jesus has been painted as part of the Gestapo. He’s standing there holding a baton, and he “loves” you. Like a father who begrudging bails their delinquent son out of jail while sighing in disapproval and grounding them for a month, God “loves” you. This is such a lie! And the horrible thing is that it’s how most people—even many Christians—view God and His son Jesus.
What if, instead of standing over you like a police officer, Jesus stands next to you with holes in His hands and a wound in His side and says He loves you? Jesus came to save the world, not to condemn it. (John 3:17)
Maybe deconstructing and throwing out some of our wrong assumptions and ideas about Jesus is one of the first steps to embracing and experiencing Him, not the hippie or cop Jesus, but the all powerful and loving son of God who lived as a human and knows first hand the most difficult things we will ever experience in life.
I've never been much of a car guy. I could never understand what the hype was about, what all the numbers and terms meant. I would hear someone (always a guy) say something like “Yeah, I drive a red '98 Eclipse 5-speed with a turbo charged 4.5 liter V8 and a custom front lip spoiler.” I could assume that by V8 he didn't mean four and a half liters of tomato juice, but I still didn't know what he was talking about.
One of my closest friends, Jordan Ziegenbein, knows a good bit about cars, and some of his knowledge has slowly rubbed off on me. I can now interpret the sentence above somewhat accurately. '98 is the year, Eclipse is a car model made by Mitsubishi, 5-speed means it's a manual transmission with five speeds, V8 means 8 cylinders – a big engine for a car, so it's probably fast and lousy on gas.
I never thought I would be the guy bragging about—or even loving—his car. But if you hang out with me for any serious amount of time you will hear me talk about my car, almost as if she was my girlfriend. I even try to hold back because I know money and car payments and repairs are all touchy subjects with people.
But anyway, I drive a green two door '94 Toyota Tercel, 4-speed manual, with a 1.5 liter, 4 cylinder, 82 horsepower engine. In May of 2007 I bought the car for $1,300 cash, and I have put less than $1,000 into it over the last two years/45k miles (it had 102k when I bought it). Jordan has saved me hundreds in repairs (changed CV axles, adjusted valve stem seals, etc.), but this car hasn't needed any major work, and it currently runs awesomely. It’s reliable, fun to drive, and I get 32-35 miles per gallon! Even the tires only cost $15-20 each. A while back I put on all new tires for under $100. This car has been the definition of a material blessing to me, a tangible way I have felt God's fatherly love.
I'm sure if I scraped together a couple hundred dollars a month I could afford the car payment that would allow me to drive a prettier, newer car that may or may not run as well, but why would I do that? Not only are car payments absolutely stupid (financing a constantly depreciating liability), but I've grown a little attached to the Hamster (its nick name, mostly because of it's body style). My brother-in-law calls it “Money Maker” because I got rear-ended over a year ago and received more money than what I had paid to buy the car.
This car has seen me through countless rides between Chattanooga and Atlanta, a trip to and from St. Louis (which included five guys plus luggage), and a trip to and from Winston-Salem. It desperately needs a paint job, the gas cap won’t close, and the passenger side door doesn’t even lock. I will eventually need a safer car (one with airbags and anti-lock brakes), but for now...I'm happily in love.
I used to think Rap music was ridiculous. I didn’t get it. “He’s not even singing!” I used to think. Sometime in high school a missionary kid introduced me to sounds of The Beastie Boys. I was floored. I ended up buying almost all their albums, but my understanding of rap (and the broader hip-hop context it dwells in) didn’t extend much further than the work of these white New Yorker Buddhists. I bought one other old skool rap album, Naughty By Nature’s self titled debut. It was fun and their voices just cracked me up.
My exploration of Rap (which I recently heard stands for Rhythm And Poetry. not sure if that is true) continued in college and I acquired albums by Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and even a newer one by Outkast. It was around this time that I was beginning to catch on to what hip-hop was, something of an umbrella term to refer to the culture, a lifestyle. Many musical styles (R&B, rap, DJ, turntablism – even some soul and funk) can fall in the loose genre of hip-hop.
I’ve wasted a lot of time being unnecessarily disdainful and disgusted with the modern mainstream hip-hop scene, the stuff you hear on the radio. And a lot of it is lousy, but a lot of it is really good. Really, really good. We are actually at a very interesting and exciting time in the history of hip-hop (which is entering its forth decade right now).
Hip-hop is king right now. Rock had its day, and its not currently on the throne. Jay-Z headlined Glastonbury last year and Oasis had a fit. But Oasis is irrelevant, and Jay-Z is one of the best rappers alive today (it's hard to determine this, they all claim to be "the best rapper alive").
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This post is a rough draft. It's rather undeveloped. I'm only about a week into this blogathon, and I feel a little overextended. Ideally I would right posts a day or two ahead of time and then edit them. Anyway, I'll hopefully come back and fix up this one. All part of the learning process of this experiment. And I do have some serious insights about hip hop; they'll come later.
