Marvin's Room

On “Underground Kings,” the song following “Marvin’s Room” on Drake’s second LP Take Care, Drake offers a revision to one of rap’s classic (misogynist) formulations, “If you ask me what I care about / rapping, bitches / rapping, bitches / bitches and rapping.”  The formulation I have in mind of course is Ice Cube’s take on 1988’s “Gangsta Gangsta,” to wit, “To a kid looking up to me / life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.”  There’s no doubt that Drake enjoys hoarding treasure, and there is no dearth, to say the least, of paeans to his own accumulation on Take Care.  Still, it’s arguable that the two main themes of Take Care are affairs of the heart and the state of the art, both of which appear in terms of the hyper-condensed time of Drake which I wrote about concerning “Headlines.”

Before going all the way into that, I want to mention some of the features of the setting, and the formal structure, of “Marvin’s Room,” finally to my mind the standout track on Take Care.   Lauren Berlant discusses the “situation tragedy” of contemporary life, and that’s an excellent place to start thinking about what’s going on in “Marvin’s.”  The song is set in the club, at the end of a party that Drake and his comrades have thrown.  The night in question is not named, but definitely takes place after the crisis which has brought Drake fame and fortune—and it is a crisis, literally, separating two times.  These times can overlap, but the absolute difference between them is itself one of the themes of Take Care.  In any case, in this club, Drake is recalling a woman from the time before his becoming wealthy and famous—signaled by the fact that her number is located in his “old phone.” 

Despite the fact that he’s extremely inebriated, and that the woman he desires has an adequate partner, he decides to call her anyway and explain his feelings about this new partner (“fuck that nigga / that you love so bad.”) Surveying the club scene around him, he absorbs the force of her rejection with a mixture of disbelief and stubborn insistence that she still has feelings for him.  A final verse moves between male bonding braggadocio and a tender plea to reconsider her rejection.  Finally, a white person recklessly says “you niggas crazy” and Drake begins to feel concern about what might happen next.  The jam ends as a cliffhanger—the suspense of which resounds in counterpoint to the surprising rejection of the object d’ drunk dial.

Drake’s alternation between rapping and singing frequently signals an emotional transition or development, and I think to no greater effect than here in “Marvin’s Room.”  The first two verses and choruses are all sung, although they do vacillate between apostrophe and description, highlighted by two almost identical lines (“I’ma call her anyway” and “I’ma call you anyway.”)  The rap introduces a group which includes Drake, a non-royal but certainly regal “we” behind the throwing of the party in question.  These rapped lines are of a totally different affect: breezy, sober, macho.   I think of as this hemistichal episode as suddenly transitioning from the scene of the phone call to the scene of exclusively male speech. 

But just as suddenly as the rap appeared, it turns again into singing.  And as it does, with the words, “I need you right now, are you down to listen to me?”, the tender, imploring speaker returns as well.  After one more turn of the verse and some muffled suggestions of a phone conversation, the final rapped lines introduce what seems narratively like the end of the night: “Just throw up while I hold your hair back / her white friend said ‘you niggas crazy’ / I hope no-one heard that”  Ostensibly Drake has settled for an overinebriated object choice with a white friend, abandoning the initial, nostalgic object choice and choosing not to resent his time.

That is, one of the important political consequences of “Marvin’s Room” is the affirmation on Drake’s part of the crisis by which he has attained fame and wealth, the existing libidinal objects that populate these two times, and the incompatibility of these objects as they absorb into the time after the crisis.  The Italian economist Christian Marazzi, considering time and progress in Capital and Affect, writes “We can’t go back; either we go with the flow or we keep resenting our time…the new does not erase the past, but only that which makes the past a kind of ballast, a dead weight preventing us from facing the future with intelligence and with the capacity for producing new affect and new political struggles.”  I find this a compelling description of the economy through which the precarious laborer drifts, and moreover I think it pertains absolutely to the subject position of the activist, and is finally precisely what’s at stake in “Marvin’s Room” vis a vis the beloved.

For the activist, the “capacity for producing new affect, and new political struggles” is a critical demand which requires some of the admittedly trademark qualities of semiocapitalist employment: flexibility, versatility, the ability to “go with the flow” and not be overburdened by the legacy of previous forms (whether they succeeded or failed.)  For Drake, in “Marvin’s Room,” the question of the situation tragedy is not which girl Drake goes him with at the end of the night.  Rather, it’s whether or not he will be able to find a present livable relative to the libidinal zeniths of a life no longer accessible to him.  What’s ironic of course is that the “present” Drake describes is one which he assumes most people would “do anything” to attain.    I find “Marvin’s Room” to be a powerful affirmation, by virtue of its refusal to solve that problem, its unresolved denouement, its paradoxical and realist portrayal of simultaneous tenderness and brutality.

I think, too, that this halting affirmation of the object in time relates to the history of North American r&b.  After all, the song isn’t called “I’m Just Saying.”  “Marvin’s Room” was recorded in the same studio that Marvin Gaye recorded Here, My Dear, a classic record of romantic heartbreak and closure.  In that way, I like to read “I’m just saying / you could do better” as a sort of address to Drake himself, his audience, and his sister and fellow artists especially.  Drake’s obsession with his career, condensed as it is, includes a sense of history and futurity as critical and formative influences on the present.  On “Make Me Proud” he raps, “I like a woman with a future and a past.”  Drake is no nihilist—objects of his desire are materially available in a historical narrative he’s struggling to understand—the difficulty and attendant pain of which constitutes the affective temperature of Take Care.  Although there’s plenty to brag about along the way, naturally. Still, the record is a document that richly proposes a melancholy euphoria, an optimism racked by existential despair, a set of emotive tragedies in direct counterpoint to a fairy tale of victory and accumulation.  In “Marvin’s Room,” all of these emotive poles inhere, preserved, not abandoned, able to at any time be (re)called.  Drunk dialed.