January 26, 2012
#11: Terius Nash - 1977 1977 is the first album I’ve ever heard by Terius Nash, who is more popularly known as The-Dream. After three albums under that name, he released this one under his real name and gave it away free on the internet. It’s clear from the start that the real reason he wrote, recorded, and released it was to try and deal with his emotions surrounding the divorce he went through this year. I’m not sure he considers it his true fourth album, but the fact that he released 1977 under his given name rather than his usual recording pseudonym is probably the only reason I ever gave it a chance. I don’t have the same sort of knee-jerk reactions against R&B that I once did, back in my die-hard rockist days, but most of the time it’s still tough for me to overcome my instinctual prejudices in that area. I’m so glad he tricked me out of that instinct, though.  “Wedding Crasher” was the first song I heard from this album, and it drew me right in. Like a lot of the songs here, it’s a totally raw expression of a negative, socially unacceptable, and selfish emotion. “I hate to have to crash your wedding with this shit,” Nash sings as the song begins. But he’s long beyond the point of concerning himself with social niceties, which makes sense once he tells us, “This is my drunk song.” “Wedding Crasher” asks the listener to identify with someone who has had too much to drink and is no longer making the choice to leave all of his hurtful, depressing thoughts unexpressed. And the song’s mournful minor-key synth, plus its downbeat R&B ballad tempo, combine with Nash’s expressive tenor to create sympathy for the song’s narrator. He doesn’t really deserve sympathy—he’s the exact sort of pseudo-sensitive creep that’s set off alarm bells amongst a lot of critics this year who were repelled by Drake and The Weeknd. The song is a belated declaration of love to a long-lost ex who is on the verge of marrying someone else. He narrates his own pain, his own struggles, while barely acknowledging the kind of pain such a declaration would cause in real life. But unlike in Drake’s music, there’s a feeling that not only the narrator, but Terius Nash, the real-life artist who wrote and sang the song and is ostensibly distinct from the narrator, recognizes how fucked up the feelings he’s singing about are. “Wedding Crasher” is, in that way, a good microcosm for this entire album. There are a lot of uncomfortable feelings expressed here, but they are never expressed in a straightforward, face-value manner; instead, there’s always a semblance of conscience lurking under the surface, as if Nash is both feeling the emotions he’s putting into the music and at the same time aware that those emotions are at least somewhat selfish and fucked up. Yet he’s decided to document them anyway, to plumb their depths for his art even knowing that they’d be totally unacceptable to express in this way in real life. Growing up I had some strange ideas about love and sex and the connection between them. I was a sensitive emo kid, and while I definitely wanted to have a girlfriend, I just knew that what I really wanted from that sort of relationship was a deep emotional connection. I wanted to experience romantic love, and I thought that in order to be properly sincere about such things, I had to have a corresponding distaste for the raw physical act of sex. It was one or the other in my mind, and I swore to myself that I was above all of that dirty self-gratifying at others’ expense. I wouldn’t be one of those boys who objectified women, just used them for their bodies. Of course, instead, I was putting them on pedestals, which is just as bad in its own way. I see that now. At the time, I wasn’t able to handle interacting with women as people just like me—my equals. That took a long, long time to get over, and it’s still something I’m struggling with. One side effect of that early misconception is my instinctual mystification with any expression of romantic love and sexual desire in the same breath. As fucked up as it is, I still see those two things more like opposites than like things that go together. “Used To Be” is the song here that most directly confronts me and my subconsciously messed-up ideas about sex and love. A lot of the lines in this song are complaints addressed to a significant other with whom the relationship isn’t going well. What I find interesting is the way the complaints move back and forth from issues that deal with the way the two of them relate on an emotional level to problems with their sex life and back within the space of a few lines. This section from the second verse is particularly illustrative: “You used to be so sweet but now you act bitter, and just so I don’t hear that shit, I drown my liver in this liquor. You used to be like this, man. You used to be my best friend. Now all you do is judge me, and scream out fuck me. But don’t fuck me! Oh, hell to the no!” It’s totally fair to say that the state of two people’s sex life is indicative of the health of their relationship, but for the longest time, I never used to feel like I had the right to complain about such things. I always thought it was so wrong to expect that kind of activity—if it happened, I was allowed to enjoy it (I rarely was even able to do that, probably because of how much trouble I had feeling like my desires in that direction were acceptable), but I couldn’t ask for it, or see the lack of it as a problem within the relationship. Even though “Used To Be” makes clear that the song’s narrator is no saint himself—soon after the previously quoted lyric comes this passage: “Now you in my cell phone screaming, ‘Who’s this bitch?’ She’s just a friend—yeah, that’s it”—the things that stick with me the most about its lyrics are that the narrator has the confidence to see a healthy sex life as something he should be able to expect in his relationship, and the way he discusses the entire situation in standard conversational language. R. Kelly’s done this before, thrown in colloquial phrases like “Oh, hell to the no” or “You used to smoke with a nigga, but now you on that bullshit,” but when R. Kelly did it, it always sounded kind of goofy to me. It would pull me right out of the headspace he was trying to create, and remind me that at the end of the day, R. Kelly is a crazy motherfucker. Somehow, though, when Terius Nash does it, it not only works but makes the entire song more lifelike, and easier to relate to. As I mentioned before, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not a listener really should be relating to the viewpoint expressed on many of these songs. The thing that makes me feel pretty much OK with it despite the obvious problems inherent in the lyrics on several of the songs on this album is that it’s an honest expression of the human condition. Terius Nash captures the kind of selfish, frustrated emotions that can run through anyone’s mind when they’re in a negative emotional state. He doesn’t apologize for or excuse them, but neither does he flinch from them. This album isn’t entirely perfect. “Silly,” a slow, drippy Deniece Williams cover sung by Nash’s female protege Casha, doesn’t really belong here, and neither does his attempt at a gangsta-rap jam, “This Shit Real Nigga.” An earlier, similarly hip-hop tune, “Ghetto,” works where this one doesn’t because of an excellent chorus, but 1977 is most effective when it’s fully immersed in the morose, synth-drenched mood that dominates all of the best songs here. From the dark, almost shoegazey wash of opening track “Wake Me When It’s Over,” through the excellent “we fight too much” lament of “Long Gone,” the title track’s heartfelt elegy for Nash’s deceased mother, and all the way to the final track, the quietly menacing acoustic-guitar driven “Form Of Flattery,” this album is at its best when its a total bummer. Maybe those less on-message songs needed to be here to keep the whole thing from getting too claustrophobic, but I think I’d have liked it even better if Nash had just gone for broke and attempted to drown us all in his tears.

#11: Terius Nash - 1977

1977 is the first album I’ve ever heard by Terius Nash, who is more popularly known as The-Dream. After three albums under that name, he released this one under his real name and gave it away free on the internet. It’s clear from the start that the real reason he wrote, recorded, and released it was to try and deal with his emotions surrounding the divorce he went through this year. I’m not sure he considers it his true fourth album, but the fact that he released 1977 under his given name rather than his usual recording pseudonym is probably the only reason I ever gave it a chance. I don’t have the same sort of knee-jerk reactions against R&B that I once did, back in my die-hard rockist days, but most of the time it’s still tough for me to overcome my instinctual prejudices in that area. I’m so glad he tricked me out of that instinct, though. 

“Wedding Crasher” was the first song I heard from this album, and it drew me right in. Like a lot of the songs here, it’s a totally raw expression of a negative, socially unacceptable, and selfish emotion. “I hate to have to crash your wedding with this shit,” Nash sings as the song begins. But he’s long beyond the point of concerning himself with social niceties, which makes sense once he tells us, “This is my drunk song.” “Wedding Crasher” asks the listener to identify with someone who has had too much to drink and is no longer making the choice to leave all of his hurtful, depressing thoughts unexpressed. And the song’s mournful minor-key synth, plus its downbeat R&B ballad tempo, combine with Nash’s expressive tenor to create sympathy for the song’s narrator. He doesn’t really deserve sympathy—he’s the exact sort of pseudo-sensitive creep that’s set off alarm bells amongst a lot of critics this year who were repelled by Drake and The Weeknd. The song is a belated declaration of love to a long-lost ex who is on the verge of marrying someone else. He narrates his own pain, his own struggles, while barely acknowledging the kind of pain such a declaration would cause in real life. But unlike in Drake’s music, there’s a feeling that not only the narrator, but Terius Nash, the real-life artist who wrote and sang the song and is ostensibly distinct from the narrator, recognizes how fucked up the feelings he’s singing about are.

“Wedding Crasher” is, in that way, a good microcosm for this entire album. There are a lot of uncomfortable feelings expressed here, but they are never expressed in a straightforward, face-value manner; instead, there’s always a semblance of conscience lurking under the surface, as if Nash is both feeling the emotions he’s putting into the music and at the same time aware that those emotions are at least somewhat selfish and fucked up. Yet he’s decided to document them anyway, to plumb their depths for his art even knowing that they’d be totally unacceptable to express in this way in real life.

Growing up I had some strange ideas about love and sex and the connection between them. I was a sensitive emo kid, and while I definitely wanted to have a girlfriend, I just knew that what I really wanted from that sort of relationship was a deep emotional connection. I wanted to experience romantic love, and I thought that in order to be properly sincere about such things, I had to have a corresponding distaste for the raw physical act of sex. It was one or the other in my mind, and I swore to myself that I was above all of that dirty self-gratifying at others’ expense. I wouldn’t be one of those boys who objectified women, just used them for their bodies. Of course, instead, I was putting them on pedestals, which is just as bad in its own way. I see that now. At the time, I wasn’t able to handle interacting with women as people just like me—my equals. That took a long, long time to get over, and it’s still something I’m struggling with. One side effect of that early misconception is my instinctual mystification with any expression of romantic love and sexual desire in the same breath. As fucked up as it is, I still see those two things more like opposites than like things that go together.

“Used To Be” is the song here that most directly confronts me and my subconsciously messed-up ideas about sex and love. A lot of the lines in this song are complaints addressed to a significant other with whom the relationship isn’t going well. What I find interesting is the way the complaints move back and forth from issues that deal with the way the two of them relate on an emotional level to problems with their sex life and back within the space of a few lines. This section from the second verse is particularly illustrative: “You used to be so sweet but now you act bitter, and just so I don’t hear that shit, I drown my liver in this liquor. You used to be like this, man. You used to be my best friend. Now all you do is judge me, and scream out fuck me. But don’t fuck me! Oh, hell to the no!” It’s totally fair to say that the state of two people’s sex life is indicative of the health of their relationship, but for the longest time, I never used to feel like I had the right to complain about such things. I always thought it was so wrong to expect that kind of activity—if it happened, I was allowed to enjoy it (I rarely was even able to do that, probably because of how much trouble I had feeling like my desires in that direction were acceptable), but I couldn’t ask for it, or see the lack of it as a problem within the relationship.

Even though “Used To Be” makes clear that the song’s narrator is no saint himself—soon after the previously quoted lyric comes this passage: “Now you in my cell phone screaming, ‘Who’s this bitch?’ She’s just a friend—yeah, that’s it”—the things that stick with me the most about its lyrics are that the narrator has the confidence to see a healthy sex life as something he should be able to expect in his relationship, and the way he discusses the entire situation in standard conversational language. R. Kelly’s done this before, thrown in colloquial phrases like “Oh, hell to the no” or “You used to smoke with a nigga, but now you on that bullshit,” but when R. Kelly did it, it always sounded kind of goofy to me. It would pull me right out of the headspace he was trying to create, and remind me that at the end of the day, R. Kelly is a crazy motherfucker. Somehow, though, when Terius Nash does it, it not only works but makes the entire song more lifelike, and easier to relate to. As I mentioned before, there’s definitely some question as to whether or not a listener really should be relating to the viewpoint expressed on many of these songs. The thing that makes me feel pretty much OK with it despite the obvious problems inherent in the lyrics on several of the songs on this album is that it’s an honest expression of the human condition. Terius Nash captures the kind of selfish, frustrated emotions that can run through anyone’s mind when they’re in a negative emotional state. He doesn’t apologize for or excuse them, but neither does he flinch from them.

This album isn’t entirely perfect. “Silly,” a slow, drippy Deniece Williams cover sung by Nash’s female protege Casha, doesn’t really belong here, and neither does his attempt at a gangsta-rap jam, “This Shit Real Nigga.” An earlier, similarly hip-hop tune, “Ghetto,” works where this one doesn’t because of an excellent chorus, but 1977 is most effective when it’s fully immersed in the morose, synth-drenched mood that dominates all of the best songs here. From the dark, almost shoegazey wash of opening track “Wake Me When It’s Over,” through the excellent “we fight too much” lament of “Long Gone,” the title track’s heartfelt elegy for Nash’s deceased mother, and all the way to the final track, the quietly menacing acoustic-guitar driven “Form Of Flattery,” this album is at its best when its a total bummer. Maybe those less on-message songs needed to be here to keep the whole thing from getting too claustrophobic, but I think I’d have liked it even better if Nash had just gone for broke and attempted to drown us all in his tears.

8:46am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Z-FUayFOgU8G
(Notes: 7)
  
Filed under: Top 20 of 2011 
  1. nickminichino said: You haven’t heard any of The-Dream’s albums? No wonder you are more forgiving of 1977’s flaws. SEEK THOSE OUT ASAP. You won’t be disappointed.
  2. bmichael said: this was a nice essay
  3. andrewtsks posted this