Schnipper’s Slept On
- story THE FADER
Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s Ciara’s Goodies. Listen to “Hotline” here and read Schnipper’s thoughts on it after the jump.
My grandmother tutors little kids, helps them with their reading. She is 83, they are six. Sunday I took a noon train to New Haven to see her and my mother and father to celebrate Mother’s Day. We went to a Turkish restaurant. My grandmother is an Turkish emigrant. She has not been back since she left, since she was around my age now. She and I both had a glass of wine, my parents abstained. Her hearing is pretty bad now, and ridiculous pride has kept her from remedying it. Until a few years ago, when her osteoporosis got too bad and her leg bone cracked on the side of a mountain, she was a weekly hiker, making it up into the atmosphere with a random assortment of adventurers many years her junior. She’s recovered well since then, though the other leg had a break as well—we found out all the calcium she’d been for years taking hadn’t entirely absorbed—and recently, mostly effortlessly, completed a 5K walk alongside my mother in the light mud of early spring.
Outside the restaurant was a touristy map of Turkey, denoting its holy landmarks. I asked my grandmother to point out Izmir, where she is from. That part of the map, the extreme western coast, bordered by the Aegean Sea, was cut off, either obscured by curtains or trimmed altogether. She pointed to where it would have been. To be honest, I don’t know very much about my grandmother’s history. Most of that is from her own cloaking. She’s kind of a weirdo. Once, when I was in college, she came to visit me and we spent the weekend walking around DC, seeing the monuments. We stopped at a small statue close to the White House and sat on a huge block of marble and she told me at length the story of her husband, of her arrival in the US, what she did for work when she became single. But her timeline was woozy and unreliable, one of those things that can be traced back to evasion, old age or both. But as long as I have been alive things with her have been mostly the same. She moved in with us about the time my brain began to remember, moved with us from New York to Connecticut. She got a job working at a nursing home, would come home late at night. If I heard her come in I knew I was up past when I should be. She moved into her own apartment my freshman year of high school. I was bummed. She’s been good though—has a Chihuahua named Yasmin, still drives regularly, reads constantly, swears pretty efficiently. She is a woman of her own vision.
So, undeservingly, I was thinking about my grandmother when I was thinking about Ciara. Ciara was on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and I watched the clips the evening I came back from New Haven on Mother’s Day. I used to have an extreme passion for Ciara’s music. “Goodies,” and the crunk&b materialization it forecasted that never arrived, was a moment of huge potential in music to me. It was a weird middle meeting of soft R&B and the tinny crunch of electronic rap beats. Ciara was an android, better than a catalyst or thin glove over some warped producers studio dreams, but a commander of robot desires herself. She was a metal Slinky, malleable but with a harsh tint. She was an equal partner, really, and that marriage was promising. I listened infinitely to “Hotline,” a non-single from her first album, produced by Bangladesh, that started her breathing “bang to this” and then spelling her name. The song’s premise, over a weaselly squeal, was her giving out her number to a dude. “Don’t you keep me waiting/ call me up.” This isn’t some crazy feminist music dream or any other hopeful stretch to link academic ideals and bubblegum, but it wasn’t the crappy opposite of that, either. Plus, she sounded weird as hell. This song has a beatboxing breakdown, no joke. “Call me up, that’s what’s up, mm mm.” The song ends like that, humming self-satisfied like a Campbell’s soup commercial.
But, on Saturday Night Live, this Ciara was gone. Five years and a few records later, there was no peppy spark, wild yearning and cocky feistiness. Why? Watching her perform “Love Sex Magic” lacklusterly, I wondered if this is where she imagined herself. Couldn’t her trajectory have kept her in bizarre digs, singing over odd futurisms with a hefty spunk? Because that flair is gone, replaced with a plain goodness, nothing poor but nothing exciting. And, so, I thought about my grandmother. Is this where, leaving Turkey, she thought of herself? Sixty years in America, not one more in Turkey? Married, two children, single, working, volunteering? Can you even imagine that far? Is it ok to? I know it is not to, but it’s hard for me not to wonder if she wondered. If Ciara can’t stick to a five year plan, well, things must have been wild for my grandma.
Inside a gift shop on Sunday, she and I leaned against a glass case of jewelry while my dad made a phone call and my mom shopped. I asked her about the tutoring and she told me about a little girl she had been teaching reading. The girl’s mother had been in jail and she was living with her grandmother whose boyfriend was not pleased about having a young girl in the house. “Do you love me?” the girl asked my grandmother. “I just met you!” she told her. “I can’t love you yet.” A few weeks into the school year, my grandmother came to tutor and the girl wasn’t there. She’s been placed in foster care. She never came back. My grandmother told me she went home and cried. But she went back the next week, was asked to work with a little boy who needed less help, so he was not initially tutored. My grandmother said he has been a joy, always very excited to read, talking excitedly about going to the museum with his parents and actively making improvements. She told me she’s not worried about his future like she is for many of the other kids who have heaps of problems predestined for them. To be honest, the way she puts it, it seems like there isn’t much these kids can do to control their destinies. But someone’s got to want change for the better, right?
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