Transcending the premise or fulfilling the promise?

Thinking back a few months ago to a New Yorker article on the different philosophies of the presidency on display in the Clinton vs Obama rift - one of Clinton's staffers or strategists says that they view Obama's promise to transcend politics as a cop-out. The quote is something like, "We don't want to transcend the Democratic party; we want to fulfill the vision of the party."

The implication being that by enacting the Democratic agenda and presumably delivering a better reality to the voters, a Clinton presidency would also deliver a lasting progressive majority to the party. Until I read this quote, I had more or less taken it at face-value that Obama's promise was better politics - offering a third way without actually being a third party candidate.

This idea - whether it is better to transcend the rules of the game or whether it is better to play the game so well that you defeat your competition (achieving a kind of transcendence) - was, I thought then, endlessly fascinating. Now, however, I'm not so sure that it's that useful a distinction.

I recently got really into Okkervil River, and what I liked about Will Sheff's songwriting was that it was unexpectedly formal. It followed the rules of singer-songwriter folk-rock, for the most part, but it did so exceedingly well. I am pretty critical of lyrics, partly because I think the human voice is one of my least favorite sounds. So, in my mind, if you're putting words to something, the words better have a very good reason to be there. But I think Okkervil River succeeds in that Clinton way - it fulfills the promise of a good singer-songwriter, a genre that I was dangerously close to considering obsolete or quaint in light of something like the Panda Bear album, Person Pitch.

So, Okkervil River fulfills the promise of its genre - but in doing so, the group ends up having a kind of transcendent power. It also sort of rewrites the rules of the game because it is so good that it feels wrong to somehow treat the music as emblematic of a genre. So in the end, have they transcended the premise, fulfilled the promise, or have they done both?

This is different from, say, Tom Waits, who early on trascended - in sound, content, style, and format - everything about being a singer-songwriter. The problem is that since he transcended the premise with a trio of albums in the early 1980's (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, and Frank's Wild Years) - Waits has been happily fine-tuning the details of his new landscape. Put another way, having transcended the game once, he then dedicated himself to playing his particular game as well as he possibly could. So, his albums now are about fulfilling the promise of what we might expect from a Waits album.

Again, where do I put these two? The ends up meet up at the same point - which is to say, like great music or not-so-great drugs, it elicits a specific need and fulfills it. I would never think, "Oh, I want to listen to some singer-songwriter stuff - let me put on Okkervil River or Waits." The thought-process with those particular artists goes from the specific (the artist) the the general (the genre).

This is totally distinct from how I feel about, say, the blues. I usually start with the genre (I want to listen to some blues) and then go to the artist. So that brings in the issue of what my expectation is when I choose something to listen to. And this is where it all falls apart. If I want to listen to some thuggy soulless hip hop, I will probably choose Notorious B.I.G. I don't want a transcendent experience from that. I want good production and moral bankruptcy, I want money, drugs, "sex in expensive cars," and other high-roller stories. I don't want Biggie Smalls to re-write reality for me or to make me thing. Ditto when you sit down to watch a romantic comedy - you don't want to be blown away. You just want a romantic comedy with all the familiar touchstones - will they make it, oh they won't, why is s/he being so stubborn and dumb, oh yay, it all worked out!

To simplify the above paragraph: we want what we want. And that's where I think the insight stops. The distinction between transcending the premise or fulfilling the promise is helpful in categorizing how successful an artist is in their own context, but it doesn't tell us anything about why we want one or the other or whether it is better to be one or the other.

You can draw this distinction into other venues - is Chris Paul transcendent or is he distilling and fulfilling our idea of a pure point guard? Do you want a good burger to re-write the rules for other bugers, or do you want the best conventional burger you can get? As with many things in life, I find it pretty easy to classify things at first, then I realize my categorization system is flawed because I've overthought it, and I end up not being anywhere closer to understanding why I may want one thing over another, which would be the point of classifying things in the first place.