Splendor and Misery is a 2016 album by the experimental hip hop group clipping. (consisting of Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan Snipes). The group describes this work, on its Bandcamp page, as “an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him” (clipping. 2016). We might say that Splendor and Misery is a space opera, in a more literal sense of the term than usual. The narrative fits the common definition of the genre, as it unfolds in the far future, and involves an adventure on a starship in interstellar space. But this science fictional storyline is largely conveyed through musical (or more broadly, sonic) means. Also, most of the album’s tracks are more concerned with exploring the wider ramifications of the story, than with elaborating the plot in detail. In this way, it is quite different from a written science fiction narrative. Such reflective storytelling in music, with rapping and singing plus noise plus a few music videos, makes for something like the twenty-first-century equivalent of nineteenth-century opera. Splendor and Misery is entirely devoid of Wagnerian grandiosity; it is quite short (37 minutes), and – despite its cosmic implications – it is intimate in scope. But much as Wagner’s operas do, albeit from a vastly different political and cultural position, Splendor and Misery offers us a mythically resonant critique of modernity.
Splendor and Misery takes place on a starship whose “cargo” consists of slaves. These prisoners have been “selected for their strength”; this probably means that they are destined to serve as cannon fodder in a war zone. But before any destination is reached, the prisoners rebel against their servitude. Almost all of them are killed in the course of the uprising, together with “the crew and other passengers.” It seems that the starship’s AI is to blame for these deaths; fearing “a total loss of control,” it causes sedatives and poisons to be “pumped through all the vents” of the ship.
However, one of the slaves survives the massacre. He succeeds in escaping confinement, commandeering the ship, and “setting a new course.” Significantly, we never learn this survivor’s name; he is referred to only by his slave classification, Cargo number 2331. No matter how far he goes, we are told, “he is still a runaway slave and so lonely.” His “gift of freedom” is only a negative one: a freedom from, but not a freedom to. The only thing he can do is continue to run away; he cannot help being “paranoia prone,” for “he knows they’re coming for him” no matter what. He has “no destination” for his flight, and no companions to share it with; in such circumstances, “his survival is paramount, there is no other objective.”
The album’s scenario designedly recalls the historical Middle Passage, when kidnapped Africans were transported by ships across the Atlantic, in order to be sold as slaves in the New World. Today, the Middle Passage functions as a crucial point of reference for Afrofuturist efforts both to understand the actual history of Black oppression, and to imagine alternative histories and futures that would be free from this oppression. What would it mean to be abducted by cruel, strange-looking aliens, who showed no mercy or empathy, but who overwhelmed you with their powerful military and carceral technology, dragged you away from your home, and put you to work in a hellish new world? It sounds like a science fiction scenario, but it actually happened: as Kodwo Eshun puts it, “slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction” (Eshun 2003). Chattel slavery in the New World was no aberration; we can no longer ignore its central role in establishing capitalist modernity as we know today (see, e.g., Beckert and Rockman 2016).
Eshun further reminds us that those kidnapped and enslaved Africans were the first moderns: the first people to experience the
real conditions of existential homelessness, alienation, dislocation, and dehumanization that philosophers like Nietzsche would later define as quintessentially modern … Slavery functioned as an apocalypse experienced as equivalent to alien abduction … Afrofuturism therefore stages a series of enigmatic returns to the constitutive trauma of slavery in the light of science fiction.
(Eshun 2003)
In this way, Splendor and Misery returns to the scene of the Middle Passage, and also to the long (and often suppressed) history of slave rebellions in the New World. The album fabulates an alternative future history by extrapolating from actual past traumas. When Afrofuturism takes up past events, projecting them into the far future, it revises and replays those events, in order to give them different – and less dire – outcomes. The Black Quantum Futurist movement today envisions “creative futures” as a way to “reach back to redefine the present and the past” (Phillips 2015). This is the utopian, liberatory side of Afrofuturism. At the same time, however, Afrofuturist speculation forcibly reminds us how deeply this history of oppression still weighs upon the world today. The United States of America has never made reparations for the slavery and genocide that were instrumental to its founding, and that still lie at the roots of its prosperity. The traumatic events of the past are not dead and buried; rather, they continue to shape the actualities of the present, and to infect our visions of the future. This is the dystopian side of Afrofuturism, resonating with the philosophical project of Afro-pessimism (cf. racked & dispatched 2017). Splendor and Misery partakes of both these tendencies. Cargo number 2331 frees himself from bondage; but he is still marked as a fugitive, and he is unable to create a new life elsewhere.
The way into Splendor and Misery is through its aggressively disruptive soundscape. Most of the album is dissonant and noisy. Hutson and Snipes’ electronically generated soundtrack includes melodies and beats such as we would expect from a hip hop album; but it also features nerve-racking low-frequency drones, together with static, distortion, feedback, and other sorts of unpitched sound. This noise sometimes works, in traditional musical ways, to accompany, and emotionally inflect, the album’s rapping and singing. But just as often, the noise interferes with the vocals: it plays over the words and threatens to drown them out.
We can hear this right at the start of Splendor and Misery. On the opening track, “Long Way Away (Intro),” the performance artist Paul Outlaw sings a plaintive verse that introduces the themes of the entire album:
I am quoting the lyrics here as if they were clearly audible; but in fact, they are difficult to distinguish. Outlaw’s voice is electronically altered; it is so distorted that it sounds as if he were singing from inside a closet, or through a low-fidelity megaphone. And his words are smothered by a wall of sound, consisting of static together with a rumbling drone that suggests the roar of airplane engines (or perhaps I should rather say, in this context, the roar of starship engines). We are barely able to extract the signal from the noise; the message seems to have been broadcast from a great distance, and under conditions of duress. This tells us that the starship is indeed, as the track’s title suggests, “a long way away,” lost in the vast emptiness of interstellar space.
Outlaw’s opening song-fragment is reprised a number of times in the course of the album. We hear it at the end of the fifth track, “Wake Up,” leading into the sixth track’s full-length choral version of “Long Way Away.” A few tracks later, the haunting melody is repeated again, without the lyrics, in “Long Way Away (Instrumental).” And we hear the fragment one last time, with slightly different lyrics, at the start of the final track, “A Better Place.” Each time, we are reminded that home, companionship, and redemption are not available to Cargo number 2331 any longer.
What is it really like to be a long way away, to be permanently exiled from home? This is the emotional and conceptual focus of the album. Cargo number 2331 “dare not stay long” in any one location, for fear of capture. In our relativistic universe, distances in space are also passages of time. If you travel at close to the speed of light, what might seem to you like a short interval of time corresponds to an immense duration for the people you left behind. A near-light-speed voyage, like the one recounted in Splendor and Misery, is therefore also a kind of time travel. But this traversal of time goes only in one direction: it hurls you irreversibly into the far future. The “ship’s clocks count millennia,” we are told, as it presses its “course relentlessly forward.” Even if you were able to return to your spatial starting point after such a voyage, so much time would have passed that everyone and everything you knew from before your departure would be long gone. This dislocation of time and space is the objective correlative of Cargo number 2331’s existential sense of exile.
The speaker of “Long Way Away (Introduction)” laments that “everything I’ve ever known is long dead.” He “can’t go back” to a home that has been destroyed. The price of freedom is eternal exile and eternal solitude. The only escape from slavery is into a far future when it no longer exists – in part because, by that time, human society itself might well no longer exist. Splendor and Misery recounts, almost in spite of itself, a mad flight, a vast displacement, an irreversible journey away from any point of origin and from any form of community. This is not an exciting nomadic adventure, but a harsh necessity. Unable to return, the speaker begs us, out of his nearly incomprehensible displacement in space and time, to at least preserve his memory, and to connect him, at least notionally, with other people: “tell the others what’s become of me.” In effect, this desperate request sets out the task that the album as a whole seeks to accomplish.
Musical performance is usually thought to heighten our sense of the present moment: it unfolds as an extended duration, during which musicians and listeners alike are enveloped in the same atmosphere of sound. This is all the more so with music organized around rhythmic call and response, as in the African-American tradition. The modern technologies of broadcasting and recording detach the musical performance from its point of origin; but this is often said to extend the musical sense of heightened presence. Broadcast allows for sonic events to be received all over the world in real time; recording allows the sound to resonate with full effect in other places and at other times.
But Splendor and Misery undermines this common presumption of sonic presence and simultaneity. It proposes a more alienated, or deconstructive, understanding of sound. Throughout the album, we are reminded of the gap between broadcast and reception, not to mention the loss of fidelity in the process of reproduction. There is no hope of call and response when the singer is isolated, and the sonic event is stretched out and dispersed. Cargo number 2331 desperately cries out for some sort of solidarity:
But he gets no answer to his call. There is no community out in the reaches of deep space; and hence no reciprocity or response. The atmosphere of noise and interference corresponds to a blockage on the level of narrative. As Nadine Knight observes, this is quite different from what happens in earlier, more optimistic, Afrofuturist works. Splendor and Misery is quite bleak; it “cannot imagine a world where the slave family can escape as a unit, where a home can be made among the emancipated” (Knight 2018).
At one point, the album drops a poignant memory of life before abduction and enslavement:
But the point of this reminiscence is that it presents a past that cannot be recovered. Cargo number 2331 did go away, for whatever (voluntary or involuntary) reasons. And now there is no way for him to return.
The album makes us hear, as it were, the very distance – and especially the time delay – separating the emission of the sounds from their reception. As Daveed Diggs raps at one point, “what if everything was at the wrong time?” The album ponders this question throughout. We might say that Cargo number 2331’s rebellion unavoidably happens at the wrong time: rather than being a historical event, it is only possible as a disruption of the (linear, progressive) order of history. Lacking a collective dimension, it cannot create a new reality, one that would have ongoing historical consequences. This slave rebellion is only a gap in the record. No matter what Cargo number 2331 does, “time will not afford him/Any cover, any pardon.” The narrative cannot be brought to any satisfying conclusion. We have no direct, real-time access to the album’s science fiction story; we can only experience it in delayed and distorted fragments. The album presents itself to us as a hazardous, incomplete, long-distance, time-lagged, and one-way-only transmission.
Traditional communication theory is all about decoding transmissions; that is to say, “reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point” (Shannon 1949). The aim is to extract a meaningful signal, isolating it from the background noise that accompanies, surrounds, and obscures it. Splendor and Misery plays with, and reminds us of, this process. There are several ciphers embedded in the album. The track “Interlude 02 (Numbers)” consists entirely of a distorted voice, almost drowned out by static, delivering a coded message in the NATO phonetic alphabet, where each word stands for a letter: “Foxtrot, Uniform, Whiskey, Romeo,/Whiskey, Charlie, Oscar, X-Ray,” and so on. The sequence spelled out here is not in itself intelligible; apparently, it is a Vigenère cipher, the key to which is given in “Air ’Em Out.” That track, in turn, also features clicks that give a message in ASCII code. There is also a sequence of Morse code dots and dashes embedded in the noisy background of “True Believer.” And the final track on the album, “A Better Place,” gives us some cryptic numerical coordinates. Online commentators have cracked all these ciphers, though the results are not tremendously informative (Kupermintz 2016; u/opheres 2018; afloweroutofstone 2019).
Despite the existence of these particular ciphers, however, we cannot find a clear message in Splendor and Misery by simply extracting the signal from the noise, or by isolating the lyrics from the rest of the sounds. As Diggs raps at one point, “the life binary in Morse code/Ain’t really a life, right?” There is no way of reducing the album to information or code, no way of separating its ideas from its emotional atmosphere of distress and confusion. The album does not have a core message content that could somehow be extracted from the noise, and reproduced “either exactly or approximately” at another location and in another time. For dislocations of time and space are necessarily inscribed within it. We must grasp the album as transmission, by attending as much to the noise itself, and to the time lag that it implies, as to the angry and melancholy lyrics. Splendor and Misery in effect dramatizes a point made by the philosopher Michel Serres. All messages are accompanied by static and interference, Serres tells us, and the process of understanding them is therefore recursive and interminable. The noisy interruption becomes a crucial component of the very signal that it interrupts. The message can only be understood when we include the difficulties and even the outright failures of its reception (Serres 1982).
In fact, the mere presence of ciphers at various points in the album is more important than the particular messages they convey. Daveed Diggs says in an interview that “slave spirituals” in the antebellum South often contained “coded messages about how to get north.” But he immediately adds that, on a deeper level, “the philosophy behind them was about transcending place. They were about home actually being in the unknown” (White 2016; cited in afloweroutofstone 2019). The encrypted songs in Splendor and Misery, like those in slave times, point to a metaphysical longing for home – something that goes well beyond the codes’ actual messages. How do you find your home when it is unknown, or long lost, and when the place you actually inhabit is a site of captivity?
Diggs’ reference to slave spirituals also helps to explain why the album is punctuated, on several tracks, with singing by the male a cappella gospel group Take 6. Their sweet, melancholy harmonies, and even their lyrics, are designedly reminiscent of old slave spirituals. Take 6’s vocals thus cut against the grain of the album’s otherwise ubiquitous noise and dissonance. Sometimes, as in “True Believer,” these voices sing a yearning chorus about “going home” against a continuing background of static. But on other tracks – “Long Way Away” and “Story 5” – their singing is unaccompanied by noise or instruments; as Ruben Ferdinand puts it, this singing is “pristine, perfect in dreamlike vividity” (Ferdinand 2016). “Long Way Away” is mournful but accepting; it reminds us that “there’s no use in crying/No reason to wait.” But it also pointedly asks us to “pray that your children/Do not sing this song.” The cycle threatens to continue, repeating itself from out of the past, and into the far future.
“Story 5” stands out among the tracks sung by Take 6, because it is the only song on the album that neither forms part of the far future story, nor simply recalls the past of slavery. Rather, despite its elegiac tone, it seems to be set in the present moment. The song tells us about an empathetic woman named Grace, loved by everyone around her, who is apparently murdered when she attempts to expose malfeasance at the factory where she works. This melodious track also expresses a yearning for home that is unfulfilled: the verses recount her gory death (“severed limbs and blood”), while the chorus asks, “Oh Grace, won’t you come back home?” “Story 5” thus combines the past of slavery (in its melody and general feel) with the present of continuing oppression (in its narrative content), posing both in implicit relation to the album’s projected future. Take 6’s a cappella singing evokes a sense of sentimental loss that feels quite different from – but that is strictly correlative to – the harsh alienation expressed through the album’s noise.
In counterpoint to this static that interferes with communication – what we might call the album’s negative noise – Splendor and Misery also offers us a lot of positive noise: bangs, clicks, burbles, groans, and other such sounds, as well as the frequent rumbling drones. As the album’s Bandcamp statement says, there is “music in the ship’s shuddering hull and chirping instrument panels,” with “rhythms produced by its engines and machinery.” These electronic sounds create “an imaginary sonic map of the ship’s decks, hallways, and quarters.” The starship’s creaks and rustlings give us a powerful sense of place, and of materiality. The ship’s massive sonic presence is both bountiful and precarious. The sound reminds us of how zealously it protects Cargo number 2331, both from the vacuum, silence, and extreme cold just beyond its thin walls, and from the other vessels pursuing him. Yet this busy noise also suggests that the machinery is not quite running smoothly, and that it may even be on the verge of breaking down. We are all too aware that the starship is pushing things to the limit, as “the navigations are failing, having traveled further than before.” In any case, hearing what one track calls “the echoes of the bowels of this floating metal hull” is crucial to our grasp of the story.
Daveed Diggs’ rapid-fire rapping mostly interacts with this positive noise. Diggs uses his voice in many different ways throughout the album, shifting among multiple roles in the narrative. At times he speaks in the persona of the starship AI, his voice a fast monotone, his diction rather stilted (“The Breach”). At other times, he speaks in the voice of Cargo number 2331, either with frantic and disjointed mumbling (the two brief freestyle tracks, “Interlude 01” and “Interlude 03,” and perhaps also “Break the Glass”), or else overtly expressing his aggression (“Air ’Em Out”). And at still other times, Diggs’ voice cannot be identified with either of the characters in the drama; instead, he offers a more abstract and distanced sort of commentary on the story. On these tracks, his voice often adopts more obviously mannered vocal rhythms (“True Believer”); or it varies from sardonic reproach to exasperation to a concerned whisper (“Baby Don’t Sleep”). Diggs also code-switches continually, moving between standard English and African-American Vernacular.
Diggs’ lyrics are always carefully stylized, even when they seem most frenetic. They are filled with allusions to works by other hip hop and pop artists, ranging from Kendrick Lamar to The Notorious B.I.G. to Carly Simon. They also reference a number of science fiction writers: Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, M. John Harrison, and above all Samuel R. Delany. In fact, the name of the album is derived from Delany’s title The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities – the announced but never actually written sequel to his space opera Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Delany 1984). Delany derived his title, in turn, from Balzac’s delirious social realist novel, Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans. The lineage here is clear. The great ambition of Delany’s space opera, much like that of Balzac’s novels, is to perform what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping” (Jameson 1991): that is to say, to analyze how particular individuals find themselves embedded in, and constrained by, social and economic networks that far exceed their grasp. Stars in My Pocket is concerned – among many other things – with the continuing legacy of slavery and genocide in a highly technologized and ostensibly cosmopolitan culture. Although clipping.’s own album is too short and compressed to do this sort of analysis – instead of cognitive mapping, it recounts a voyage into unmapped realms – it presumes our acquaintance with the deep background of the slavery-capitalism nexus.
We first hear Diggs’ voice when he explicitly takes on the persona of the “Mothership” – that is to say, the starship’s AI – on the second (“The Breach”) and third (“All Black”) tracks of the album. The AI reports what at first it sees as merely “a small anomaly.” This is in fact the start of the slave rebellion. In the course of the track, the AI becomes increasing concerned with the revolt. It offers to take suppressive action, but it still “requires an approval code from the administration” in order to do so. Then it warns – its sense of urgency still expressed in an almost comedically bureaucratic prose – that “it cannot easily be overstated the importance of alacrity/In acting out the task commanded.” Finally, when it is already too late, the AI asks to “send security immediately over to the gate.” Behind these declarations, we hear the roar of the starship’s ordinary functioning. But at a certain point, as the AI completely loses control, this drone gives way to sounds of glass being shattered, stuff being smashed and broken, fighting, and danger sirens going off.
The AI only has a limited understanding of human beings. It grasps motivation and action from the outside, using sensors to monitor the physiological state of its human inhabitants. As the rebellion heats up, the AI notes a “spiking in the pulse of a member of the cargo,” followed by a “critical” level of “endorphins that are often linked to violence,” and then a “rage in the nervous system.” Once Cargo number 2331 has taken over, the AI observes his facial expression and bodily posture in addition to these somatic indicators; thus it observes that “his vitals read normal but his face reads murderous.” The AI still fails to understand habitual human actions, however, as when it watches Cargo number 2331 say grace (“he insists on speaking passages before he eats”) or take a shower (which seems to the AI to be “a ritual of some sort”). It also describes how Cargo number 2331
This effectively conveys the man’s rage and despair to us, while showing that the AI itself still doesn’t quite get it.
Despite this incomplete understanding – or perhaps because of it? – the AI gradually falls in love with Cargo number 2331. The escaped prisoner has “unlocked something new” in the ship; in freeing himself, he has also freed the AI from its own bondage to its imperial owners. The AI now finds capacities within itself that it was never aware of before: “the metal’s being moved into a thing it doesn’t do.” There’s an amicable and even erotic dimension to the ship’s new feelings:
As Nadine Knight rightly observes, the ship’s love for its human passenger offers us “a refreshing twist” on the usual space opera narrative, one that “gestures toward rich readings of posthuman romance and genderqueer readings” of the relations between human and machine (Knight 2018).
But alas, this queer utopian promise does not come to fulfillment. Conditions are just too grim. Cargo number 2331 does not seem to understand the AI’s overtures, and in any case does not respond to them: this is yet another instance of unreciprocated messages. Evidently, Cargo number 2331 has only a functional understanding of the starship; he never asks it for anything more than to “turn on the light” or to provide him with some “beats.” Whatever cyborg dreams the AI may entertain, the album’s focus remains on the finitude and vulnerability of Cargo number 2331’s all-too-human body. “Flesh is weaker than the metal,” after all; “the body can only take so much.” While “circuitry” is “serviceable” for many purposes, “your sinews are more intuitively designed for dance.” But is dancing even possible in these extreme circumstances? “The odds of the body/Making it through and surviving the gravity shift” are extremely slim. And again,
The AI’s love for Cargo number 2331 is explored on the third track of the album, “All Black.” This track starts with the Mothership reporting the slave rebellion and requesting assistance. But by the end, the ship instead demands safe passage for itself and its passenger: “This love will be defended at all costs, do not fuck with it.” As it depicts this reversal of attitude, the track rings the changes upon multiple meanings of the repeated words “all black everything.” This phrase was initially used in Jay-Z’s 2009 song “Run This Town,” where it refers to Jay-Z’s style as an emblem of his Black nationalist (and capitalist) aspirations. The phrase has subsequently “become a certified Hip Hop meme” (Genius.com 2009). Most notably, Lupe Fiasco’s 2011 song “All Black Everything” recounts a “dream” of a utopian world in which Black people are free and able to flourish, because the Middle Passage never happened: “there were no slaves in our history,/Were no slave ships, were no misery” (Genius.com 2011). In the song by clipping., which instead imagines an escape from the Middle Passage, “all black everything” still implies Black liberation; but it also refers (among other things) to the void of interstellar space, to the mental state of Cargo number 2331, with his rage and his inability to imagine any future, and even to the Abyss of the AI’s own inhuman consciousness.
Since there is no place of safety, and “nowhere to arrive to,” there can be no such thing as a happy ending (or even a definitively unhappy ending) to the story of Splendor and Misery. Cargo number 2331 tries to convince himself that his “sense of loneliness [is] the price of paying for a new beginning.” But even this hope is precarious. For he knows that
Rather than being able to find someplace to start over, therefore, Cargo number 2331 has to keep on moving. “Staying is surrendering”; no matter where he “pit-stops,” he “dare not stay long.” You “can’t shake what you’ve done/No matter how far you outrun it”; and so the only option is to keep traveling at full speed through the interstellar void.
Since this voyage is interminable, the story of Cargo number 2331’s lonely escape, and of the AI’s thwarted love for him, cannot be brought to any sort of conventional narrative conclusion. Splendor and Misery works instead with a different, more oblique, mode of storytelling. The album’s later tracks do not forward the narrative, so much as they offer a variety of perspectives on what is really an unresolvable situation. For instance, “True Believer” and “Air ’Em Out” both contain images of war, mass murder, and mass abduction, the very reality from which Cargo number 2331 is trying so desperately to escape.
Several other tracks concern the AI’s effort to rouse Cargo number 2331 from his state of insensibility and despair. On the fourth track, it desperately calls on him to “Wake Up.” On the twelfth track, it tries to get him to “Break the Glass” as one does in order to push an emergency button; on this track the phrase “wake up” is repeated over and over. And on the fourteenth track, it exhorts him, both roughly and gently, to stay alert: “Baby Don’t Sleep.” But what is gained by these returns to full awareness? Nothing can compensate for the dead-end bleakness of Cargo number 2331’s situation. On “Wake Up,” the AI’s assurance that it will “be right here when you wake up” is transformed into the disquieting sense that, due to the starship’s “jumps” through hyperspace, “there’ll be no here when you wake up.” On “Break the Glass,” with its desperate call for an impossible connection, we get the ominous suggestion that “you already know they can’t hate if they don’t ever wake up.” And in “Baby Don’t Sleep,” the loss of everything familiar, together with the fact of “no destination,” seems to lead to cosmic nihilism:
Three of the album’s tracks have associated music videos: “True Believer,” “Air ’Em Out,” and “Baby Don’t Sleep.” But these videos do not illustrate the album’s overall narrative; they, too, are situational, devising indirect analogies for the torturous “bouts of stasis” to which Cargo number 2331 is prone. The words of “Air ’Em Out” suggest a violent revenge fantasy, full of military threats, as if Cargo number 2331 were himself to go to war against the warmakers who kidnapped and drafted him. But the music video for the track, directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, instead suggests the underlying futility of the whole situation. Diggs, dressed in what looks like a flight uniform, sits at a table furnished with an old-style telephone, a desk lamp, and a few other items. He swallows pills from a medicine bottle, washing them down with liquid he drinks through a straw. Periodically, the objects on the table shake as if in an earthquake, and then rise up toward the ceiling (as might happen in the weightlessness of outer space). Diggs responds each time by trying to slap the objects back down to the table. (He does not seem to be affected by weightlessness.) He also grasps at pills floating through the air, and swallows them. At one point during the shaking, the screen goes black; after a few seconds, the image returns, but now seen through a night vision camera that gives everything a sickly green hue. Finally, the table itself rises up into the air; Diggs pushes it violently back down to the floor, and then slowly backs out of the room, while continuing to glance at the table with suspicion. The video does not give a literal depiction of weightlessness, but it amply conveys the sense of dislocation and frustration that Cargo number 2331 might feel as a result of his exile.
Lopez Estrada’s video for “True Believer” also juxtaposes the mundane and familiar with the inscrutability and alienation of outer space. The start of the video shows us an inner-city bodega (“American Deli Market”) late at night, closed and deserted, trash bags in front of it on the sidewalk. The track’s harsh beats, over a staticky drone, are matched with cuts to closer and closer views. As Diggs’ rapping starts, an astronaut in full spacesuit and helmet (played by Paul Outlaw) begins to rise out of the bodega’s basement. From here on, there are no more cuts: the camera follows the astronaut with a single continuing shot that moves upwards with him, but also gradually pulls back as he ascends.
At first, we are close enough to the astronaut’s face to see him look at us imploringly from within his helmet, as if he were begging us for a sign of recognition that we cannot give him. He lip-syncs the words of longing for home that are sung by Take 6 in the chorus. The astronaut rises slowly, past the store and the tenement floors above it, and into the sky. Behind him, we see city lights shining in the distance, and then, finally, the dark sky with just a few stars. By this time the song has reached its coda; the beats are gone, and we only hear the drone, punctuated by distorted and synthesized voices. Now we are able to see the astronaut’s whole figure, encased in his golden spacesuit, hanging in the void. But we are no longer able to make out his face beneath the helmet; we are just too far away.
As for the track’s vocals, Diggs raps in a slow, measured cadence, matching the brutal beats. The first verse of “True Believer” gives us an apocalyptic vision of warfare, once again recalling the Middle Passage. “Ships/Made for cargo and death” strafe a planetary surface, and abduct everyone whom they have not killed:
In the second verse, however, Diggs widens the scope of his narration. He gives us a mythical account of the creation of the world, and its endless strife. There are three original sibling gods, who “fight as siblings do.” One of them poisons her brother “just to see what he would do.” As a result, he “vomited the sun”; the rest of the world as we know it soon followed. The gods finally created “man of many hues”; but these first human beings did not long remain on an equal footing, since “the white one in the image of/A sickly god would get his dues” at everyone else’s expense. This myth of white privilege is echoed at the very end of the track, when a synthesized voice mutters that “pale gods told me to my face … the place I seek I never find.”
The third verse of “True Believer” traces, in allegorical form, the invention of slavery and capitalism. “Man” (sic – evidently meaning the dominant group of white people) “makes time come to a standstill.” As a result, a certain “race of beings” is able to place
How do you sell something as abstract as time? When time is encased inside human bodies, these bodies become stores of value. They contain minutes and hours, days and weeks, which can be released and appropriated in the form of periods of work. Time is no longer a concrete duration that one lives through, but rather an abstract, measured, and finite quantity that one must give up in order to survive. Masters can profit by extracting this embodied time: either they own human bodies outright and work them to death (chattel slavery), or else they put those human bodies to work in measured increments (wage labor). In either case, slaves and workers are forced to expend themselves, giving up their embodied time in return for mere subsistence (or sometimes, not even that).
Cargo number 2331 is himself a victim of this procedure:
Even as an escaped slave, he is still bound to this capitalized time, and therefore still compelled to race the clock. It is only “when time stops,” if it ever does, that “for him finally there can be rest.” But can time ever stop for any of us, short of death? On “Baby Don’t Sleep,” the penultimate track on the album, there is still “no time for waiting.” And even on the somewhat-upbeat final track, “A Better Place,” Cargo number 2331’s “time-bound conscience” is still apparently the one thing “that keeps him out pushing through nothing.”
The music video for “Baby Don’t Sleep” is far more abstract than the other two videos. It provides an appropriately harsh visualization of the scorched-earth, violently amelodic texture of the track. The video is directed by the multimedia artist Cristopher Cichocki, whose “visual experiments” involve “interference static, oscilloscopic wavelengths, and flicker-frame animation” (PIAS 2016). The track’s sonic background consists in rhythmic pulses of static, white noise, and sonic events that sound like collisions, or like objects shattering into fragments. The video matches these rhythms with strobe cuts among abstract patterns of vertical and crisscross interference lines, flashes of what looks like decayed film stock, animations of patch cables attaching themselves to a huge mixing board, and the disappearing signal of a video screen as it is turned off.
When Diggs raps in this video, his face appears in extreme close-up. He lip-syncs the song while sunglasses cover his eyes. His image is usually presented in a black-and-white negative; sometimes it flashes positive for a moment, and other times the face-on image is replaced or supplemented by ghostly profiles facing inward from both edges of the screen. At still other times, the camera is so close that Diggs’ lips nearly fill the screen. Diggs’ image continually flickers, and often seems on the verge of dissolving into abstract patterns. Moreover, his image is almost never presented directly to the camera. Rather, it is layered behind various sorts of quickly pulsing lattice patterns and other obstructions, including wire-mesh fences, screens, strobe flashes, and rapidly alternating lines.
“Baby Don’t Sleep” is lyrically as well as sonically the most abrasive track on the album. Diggs alternates between more declamatory and more metrical styles of rapping. His words caustically demolish all of the hopes, fears, and laments that have been expressed on previous tracks. Cargo number 2331’s ideals – the things he yearns after, and believes in – are nothing more than self-inflicted, and indeed cripplingly self-congratulatory, delusions:
These are all consolations. They might make Cargo number 2331 feel better, in the same way a nickel bag of weed would. But they don’t really change anything. They have no purchase upon the actuality of his situation. They explain away his oppression and his exile, without giving him any tools to deal with them.
Diggs issues a steady stream of bitter words, throughout the track. But he pauses, briefly, just before the pre-chorus, and then again before and during the chorus proper. (The pre-chorus and chorus come around twice in the course of the song.) The pre-chorus and chorus are also the only portions of the track that have any sort of toned sounds to them at all, rather than just unpitched noise. The pre-chorus reminds Cargo number 2331 yet again of the losses he has suffered, and of the emptiness of his hopes:
And most importantly of all, perhaps: “saviors are fiction.” Cargo number 2331 shouldn’t expect any sort of redemption or restitution. Nobody is going to rescue him. But then, Diggs ends the pre-chorus poignantly rather than harshly, by evoking “memories fading like ghosts, ghosts.” There is no cure for yearning and nostalgia, except to know that they too will fall apart, and vanish into oblivion.
After another pause, we get the chorus proper, which gives us the track’s only hint of a respite. The chorus solely consists of repetitions of the title phrase “baby don’t sleep.” (Sometimes it is extended to “baby don’t sleep too much.”) At first, the phrase is repeated in Diggs’ almost-singing voice; then it is repeated in a high-pitched, cartoony synthesized voice. But finally, after yet another brief pause, Diggs says “baby don’t sleep” just once more – only this time in a whisper, and with no accompanying background noise. I want to say that this concluding whisper, with its note of tenderness and intimacy, entirely changes the overall feel of the song. It doesn’t negate all the bitter scorn that came before; we are still in the heart of loneliness and loss. We also remain aware that much of Cargo number 2331’s misery has been self-inflicted; as we recall from an earlier track, he “seems upset by that to which he is subjected/But convinced he brought it on himself.” But even at this desperate moment, oblivion and exile also have much to recommend them – especially when the alternative, the society that Cargo number 2331 is fleeing from, is grounded in slavery, murder, and exploitation. “Baby don’t sleep,” and you may be able, knowingly, to embrace the “all black everything.”
Indeed, clipping. suggests as much on its Bandcamp page for Splendor and Misery:
In a reversal of H. P. Lovecraft’s concept of cosmic insignificance, the character finds relief in learning that humanity is of no consequence to the vast, uncaring universe. It turns out, pulling the rug out from under anthropocentrism is only horrifying to those who thought they were the center of everything to begin with. Ultimately, the character decides to pilot his ship into the unknown – and possibly into oblivion – instead of continuing on to worlds whose systems of governance and economy have violently oppressed him.
(clipping. 2016)
Isn’t there something dishonest – or perhaps it would be better to say, symptomatic – about the way that Lovecraft conflates cosmic indifference with cosmic malice? On the one hand, Lovecraft’s Old Ones appear to be no more concerned with (or even aware of) human beings than we are with the tiny organisms that we obliterate under our feet, unknowingly, with every step we take. But on the other hand, and at the same time, these figures are portrayed as willfully destructive, and actively hostile to (ostensibly civilized) humankind; this is what makes them grotesque objects of pagan worship, screens upon which Lovecraft projects all his racist fantasies. There is a nasty sleight of hand at work here, in the way that cosmic horror provides an alibi for Lovecraft’s panicky clinging to white supremacy. Against this, Cargo number 2331 does well to take comfort in the evidence of a “vast, uncaring universe.” After all – and in contrast to Lovecraft’s neurasthenic upper-class white characters – he never thought that he was important, or at the center of things, in the first place. At the very least, the outer reaches of the cosmos are not pervaded with the parochial prejudices and injustices that actually prop up our own (white, patriarchal American) supposed cosmopolitanism and universalism.
These considerations help us to make sense of Splendor and Misery’s final track, “A Better Place.” This song, unlike everything else on the album, features a corny, cheesy, upbeat melody – actually not much more than an extended cadence – that sounds like it is being played on a calliope, or some such carnivalesque instrument. Clashing with this, we hear Paul Outlaw’s elegiac and heavily processed voice, singing “A Long Way Away,” just like at the very start of the album; only this time, recalling the bitter experience of exile and isolation, Outlaw tells us to find nourishment in our very state of exile: “remember the darkness will show you the way.”
After Outlaw’s introduction, Diggs’ voice enters the mix. His rapid rapping recapitulates many of the album’s overall themes, from messages gone awry, to the oppressions of time (both when it passes away and when it lingers), to all the deprivations that Cargo number 2331 has suffered:
Here we have the loss of community, the loss of all sorts of experiences, both positive and negative (with a shout-out to Delany’s lost novel), and finally the loss even of a certain feeling of loss (“being missed”). It’s a problem, Diggs tells us, of “making the best of a universe/Far too expansive to cope with” – a universe that “he never chose” – while “the senses are numbed by emotional stresses.” Cargo number 2331 (and anybody who follows in his footsteps) is a victim of “centuries/Of mistakes” that he cannot help internalizing; he “calls it history.” We cannot erase the past, but must we remain bound by its constrictions? Diggs suggests that “species with memories longer” than ours “don’t bother with sweating the old shit.”
All the while, the relentlessly upbeat carnival music continues, and even gets thickened with occasional drum beats and synthesized arpeggiated chords. The track goes round and round, coming back repeatedly to a chorus that Diggs sings instead of speaks:
In the course of this chorus, the aim of Cargo number 2331’s quest slips from the fully positive “be somebody” (as in the old protest chant “I am somebody!”) to the far more ambiguous “be somebody else” (implying a process of metamorphosis). We would do well to be suspicious of fixed identities here, given how the album’s protagonist finds it so difficult to shake off his former identity as a slave, fixed by a number. He doesn’t know what “something else” will be, and neither do we. But this at least means that something is open, and not already predetermined.
Similarly, to say that “there must be a better place” is to make a wishful assertion, and not to state a settled fact. No “better place” is actually known; the album has argued at great length that the likelihood of finding one is minuscule. Nevertheless, “there must be” such a place; for Cargo number 2331’s very life is staked upon “the hope brought on by this belief.” The force behind this “must be,” therefore, is hypothetical and multiply mediated: an insistence founded upon a hope that is itself founded upon an unsubstantiated belief. As Diggs says earlier in the track, it is a “bet” made in the full knowledge that its “odds are ungodly.”
We might say, following the typology that Kim Stanley Robinson adopts from Fredric Jameson, that this attitude – “there must be a better place” – is not directly (or “naively”) utopian, so much as it is “anti-anti-utopian” (Robinson 2019). To continue this quest for a better place in spite of all the odds is to reject the ostensibly “realistic” assumption that “there is no alternative” (Margaret Thatcher’s notorious slogan, cited by Fisher 2009), or that the world we know, with its oppression and exploitation, is the only world there is or ever can be. It is better – and indeed even safer – to “set up a random course” into the unknown than to stay with what is reliably oppressive and deadly.
The qualifications here do not negate the force of the assertion; just as the self-consciously acknowledged chintziness of the music does not erase how jubilant and celebratory it feels – all the more so in the face of the harrowing experiences that the album has put us through up to this point. If this is irony, it’s not of the usual cynical sort. Rather, clipping.’s mode of irony allows them to actually say something positive and affirmative, without falling into the Disneyesque cheerfulness of so much mainstream culture. As members of the band put it in an interview,
Making the void and the infinite unknown a triumphant choice at the end of this record was the heated discussion of many a night while making this record … the discussion was how to make it sound like piloting into a black hole feel like a powerful choice.
(Burns 2016)
At the end of “A Better Place,” as the music thickens, with more insistent arpeggios and more active percussion, Diggs repeats the exhortation
until finally all we hear of his voice is “Go! Go! Go!” in the background, gradually fading out, while the music gets ever louder, thicker and dronier. This sound is dissonant because of all the overtones, but it still contains pitched notes rather than unpitched noise. This final minute of the album even has some of the emotional effect of an extended cadence at the end of Wagner’s operas or other pieces of classical music. But as befits the science fiction storyline, not to mention clipping.’s overall aesthetic, Splendor and Misery ends, not with any sense of final resolution and (post-orgasmic) repose in the tonic key, but rather with the sound abruptly cut off while it is still going full blast.