Motivation

In 1843, the French minister to the king, Francois Guizot, answered a populace speaking out against the injustice of high fees imposed to purchase suffrage by uttering the infamous slogan enrichissez vous, or, “enrich yourself.”  In other words, the bourgeois state’s response to the proletariat’s sense that equality shouldn’t be dealt as an object of exchange was to deflect the argument into the practical maxims which sustain capitalist hegemony and constitute capitalist “morality:”  hard work, thriftiness, and ruthless hoarding.

The call of course shows that the bourgeois state conflates abstract notions of merit and moral or intellectual worth with wealth in money.  Guizot’s exhortation to the proletariat can’t be read outside of that primary conflation. And is that not the message of so many of our institutional sloganeering before and since? To “better” oneself means no more nor less than an increase in accumulation.  The above is hopelessly reductive of course, but some of the aporias operative in it are reminiscent of what transpires in the astonishing jam “Motivation,” sung by Kelly Rowland and ft. Lil Wayne.

“Motivation” essentially proposes a scene, in media coitus, on the cusp of the (female) singer’s orgasm.  It forecasts a future by articulating its desires to the absolute erasure of a history prior to the lovers entering the bed.  I amuse myself by thinking that the some of the uncanniness of the social provocations it performs derive from the tumultuousness of the moment it narrates, the abdication of normative sense to the semi-articulate moans of pleasure. Indeed, one primary assertion of the singer’s desire is the erasure of auto-sentience in deference to the powerful touch of the other (“And when we’re done / I don’t wanna feel my legs / I just wanna feel your hands all over me.”) 

But “Motivation” is not all made of semi-articulations because, of course, the primary intention of the song is to promise, and therefore act as, the rhetorically persuasive catalyst to action. This doesn’t rule out the rhetorical power of semi-articulate moans of pleasure, far from it. The real aporia of this persuasive rhetoric, though, is what exactly it intends to effect. That is, what is the singer motivating the lover to do exactly?

I’m not being totally stupid.  But in the heteronormative economy of the jam, I want to draw attention to the ambivalent tropes which characterize the male sexual performance and its discontents, its deep gender trouble and stamina anxieties. It seems to me there are two great gendered fictions being signaled in “Motivation,” the desperate impenetrability of the female orgasm as read by heteronormative masculine desire, and the anxiety concerning heteronormative male stamina as insufficient to satisfy his lover.  So there’s something extremely loaded and ambiguous about the singer’s exhortation to go go go. That imperative can mean, “hurry up and reach your destination,” but here, precisely this is not meant. In fact, the opposite is meant. What it really intends is something like “hurry up and don’t reach your destination.”

So part of the thrill of “Motivation” is precisely in its manipulation of “climax,” endlessly deferred and yet repeatedly implied. I mean, there is this post-coital moment which suffuses the phrase, and yet it’s a time has to be delayed, paradoxically by an expenditure of energy and self-deflecting effort. Which, of course, is a little like the social situation encouraged by Guizot’s malevolent invocation above: enriching oneself financially is obviously a pursuit with a telos that can never be attained. One can always be richer. The only practical thing to do is to continue the expenditure of energy towards perpetuating the pursuit itself.

These economies collide in the most startling image in the song, its denouement: “so go lover / go and make me rain.” Now, Weezy’s guest verse already performs the critical literalization: “I turn that thing into a rainforest / rain on my head, call it brainstorming.”  For the connoisseur, Wayne’s appearance on “Motivation” might not be one of his finest moments; one may even prefer a somewhat similar iteration on Mike Jones’ 2008 jam “Cuddy Buddy” (in which Wayne rhymes “Voila” with “Allah.”) But this couplet is about as weird and good as it gets. Inasmuch as his verse is a singular play expressing the love of cunnilinguis, the figure of the “rainforest” evokes both the “bush” which signifies the pubic hair and the “rain” of ejaculate. It occurs to me that I don’t really need to draw this out for you, my reader. Sigh. “Rain on my head” confirms that Wayne is giving head, right. But then “brainstorming.” One has to think of course of Jay-Z’s classic line, “get your umbrellas out / cause that’s my brainstorm,” inscribing forever the literalization of that metaphor we live by.  But given the stable meaning of “brain” in hip hop as itself head (although almost ALWAYS referring to heterosexual fellatio), “brainstorming” aspires to the plateau of the pataphoric, an abstract brag impossibly literal, a literalization multiply referential.

Which is all to say that Wayne’s verse grounds this pataphor as an available signifier in the jam, and Kelly’s evocation doesn’t read as perverse as it actually is.  I mean that, the first layer of metaphor parades its legibility: “rain” comfortably refers to the ejaculate accompanying orgasm, orgasm which is, after all, what the singer is motivating the lover to effect. And yet “make (pronoun) rain” isn’t a neutral phrase which lends itself to reappropriation at the expense of its own stable meaning.  “Make it rain” as you know is a verbal unit which means “to throw money at strippers at great volume, much as there are many raindrops constituting ‘rain,’ there are many bills constituting this display of wealth and gratitude.” 

So to some extent, I read Kelly’s sublating this stable epithet and the new meaning proposed by Wayne in the precipitous architecture of the jam as suggesting that Kelly is not only the privileged object of the lover’s energetic expenditures (fixated on the delayed telos of the orgasm) but also something that will produce money.