Genealogy of a Remix: Sickick’s GOMD

Mar 23

“Art criticizes society merely by existing.”

-Adorno

1.

Sickick’s track “GOMD” is theoretically a remix of a J Cole track of the same name. The metadata vary; on some sites it is listed as “GOMD by J Cole (Sickick Mix),” on others the artist name is just Sickick; on others it is “Sickick (J Cole).”

Both songs are driven by an eerie looped vocal sample; in the original it is loping, lopsided, vaguely like a fieldhand’s work song — in the Sickick version it has been edited to make it more rhythmic, sounding more like a gospel song, and an overdubbed lyric makes it seem to say

“me oh my, I’m a ghost, yo; me oh my, I’m a ghost.”

But that is not what it says.
J Cole, who is credited as producer of the original track, got the sample by chopping up two sections of a song on a Branford Marsalis album, editing them together and speeding them up so the male vocals of the original sound female.

But that song — “Berta, Berta” — is not by Marsalis. Marsalis doesn’t even play on it. The song is a chaingang shanty sung by enslaved railroad workers; and we know it because it was recorded at Parchman Farm in the 40s by Alan Lomax, the legendary collector of American folk music. The Marsalis version is a lot like Lomax’s original, but better-sounding — as it should be, since it was recorded in a studio; it is a kind of cinema verité re-creation, complete with loud katydid sound effects, swinging hammers, and a panting chorus, conducted for Marsalis by a musicologist called Dwight Andrews.

“Berta, Berta” is a tortured love song. In it a man, imprisoned at Parchman Farm, encourages his woman, on the outside, to leave him and marry someone else. We might pause for a moment to consider how it felt, for the men Lomax recorded, who were actually incarcerated at Parchman, to sing this song. Did they have women waiting for them on the outside? What did they make of this white guy and his microphone?

Anyway, the fragment edited and looped by J Cole, and re-edited by Sickick, says: “I might not want you, when I go free, oh ah.”

I don’t think either Cole or Sickick necessarily knew that; it’s kind of hard to make out the words. But listen closely and you will hear.

“I might not want you, when I go free.”

Now, Cole’s song is some frankly mid rapping about guns in the trunk and hoes with testicles in their mouth, unremarkable except for that chopped up sample. “GOMD” stands for “get off my dick.” All in all, it is an uninteresting example of 2010s commercial hiphop, not gangsta enough to be gangsta nor conscious enough to be conscious. But the video; we have to talk about the video a bit.

The video tells a story, a story completely unrelated to the lyrics which Cole mouths at the camera. In the video narrative Cole, an enslaved house servant on a plantation, unloved by the enslaved female house servants and disrespected by the enslaved field hands, steals the keys to the plantation gun cabinet and distributes the guns, starting an uprising, after which all the other enslaved servants smile at him with love and friendship.

There are a few different ways of looking at this narrative. Sympathetically, it is a call for those who find themselves in positions of access to use that access to advance the cause of collective liberation. You could also see it as some elitist revolutionary vanguard type shit; or even as wish-fulfillment LARPing. Whatever; what’s fascinating is that the narrative is so completely disconnected to anything about the song.

Except that vocal loop.

Cole reportedly had tried to use this narrative for a video to an earlier song; but is it not obvious? It is the sample, shining through, like a grave rubbing, that wanted a different story to be told. The anonymous singers on Lomax’s recording, refracted through Marsalis’s reimagining and Cole’s sample editing, are still haunting the ruined halls of popular music, ghostlike, revenants.

“Might not want you, when I go free.”

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, famously dissected what they called “the culture industry.” In the culture industry, what were originally spontaneous outpourings of human creativity become commodities, for sale at the price the market determines, a certain supply and a certain demand, fungible with one another; two cheap songs for one more expensive song.

In their working notes, they used the phrase “mass culture” instead of “culture industry,” but thought better of it; because the masses don’t produce the culture. The masses are produced by the culture. That is the industry. The culture industry makes humans into masses. Humans also become fungible; they are transformed from subjects of culture to its objects, consumers.

According to Teddy and Max, the former divisions between “high” and “low” art become drained of meaning by the culture industry. “High” art is no longer the precious cargo of generations of human experience, preserving lessons learned for the future; “low” art is no longer inherently rebellious and critical of the status quo. Rather, they become nothing more than two types of product intended for different segments of the population — ultimately no more different than Coke and Pepsi.

“Something is provided for all so that none may escape.”

Frederic Jameson, expanding on this, influentially defined postmodernism as an ahistoric condition, in which the history of culture exists only as pastiche, “speech in a dead language.” In place of history, of memory, there are only caricatures, period costumes, synthetic fakes. There is neither continuation, nor any real encounter with the reality of history or of culture; merely endless remixing of shallow references.

I agree with all these critiques; and yet there are other forces at play. I am not speaking of “remix culture” per se — most theorizing of remix culture remains unaware of Jameson’s profoundly pessimistic analysis, and so naïvely celebrates the “realm of the lost original,” the “free-floating signifiers,” and all the rest of it. These technical and economically predetermined elements of contemporary culture are, in a cynical view, only so many ways of saying “pastiche”; value-engineering, bad wine in good bottles, the tyranny of the same.

But I want to suggest that cultural currents swell and flow, beneath the surface of technocapitalism and its imperatives, following their own dark pathways. That what is repressed can return; that remix culture is also palimpsest culture, and that far from being an ahistoric schizophrenic collage of fakery, its history, its genealogy, is on display within it, is live and potent — as William Morris memorably put it, in a very different context:

“The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.”

Along with the overwhelming majority of J Cole’s beats, Sickick discards his bars. Instead, his chopped and screwed, detuned voice raps in a horrorcore style:

“They call me the freak of the fall / Fuck a little bitch, I've come to take it all / I'm a ghost, who the fuck you gon' call? / Mossin’ with a scarecrow in the field, no (caw) / Lucifer reborn as a God / Feast on the blood drippin' down my jaw / Step out of my line and get outlined in chalk / Prince of the dark and the dead will walk”

Credits are hard to find for Sickick tracks. Information in general about him is hard to find, probably a tactical move by his handlers; he is one of those artists who only appears masked, a schtick that may have been cool when Doom did it, and works for Orville Peck I guess, but unfortunately risks falling into Deadmau5-style cringe all too easily. My wife, a dj, tells me his name is pronounced “psychic,” though I’m not sure how she knows that. Anyway, no other vocalists are mentioned anywhere in connection with this track; which either means that the woman’s voice that sings the next verse is uncredited or, I suspect, is also Sickick, pitch-shifted up this time:

“I can feel my enemy begin to fear my drum / I am ready, when it comes to pain I'm numb / I could tell you things you won't believe I've done / I kill to feel alive”

And then, carrying the song to the end of its brief two minutes and ten seconds:

“Me oh my, I’m, a ghost, yo / Me oh my, I’m, a ghost”

It would be the crudest kind of pretension to intellectually analyze these lyrics, which do not work on that level at all. But we have to ask: Who is the ghost? Whose ghost?

How did a ghost come to be speaking here? How was it given voice? What is it trying to say?

Sickick retains only one thing from J Cole’s track; a vocal loop, which he re-edits to make it more percussive, more insistent.

And as the song ends, Sickick, a man, sings in a woman’s voice lyrics which sound like, but are not, the vocals sampled by another artist, detuned to sound like women’s voices, though they are men’s voices, reproducing other men’s voices from a yet earlier recording.

Incarcerated men, singing a work song to make their forced labor bearable. Their voices, like ghosts, haunting the airwaves; moving across the decades with their own agenda. Ghost voices announcing themselves insistently, refusing to be silenced.

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