GOD SAW THAT THE LIGHT WAS GOOD; AND GOD SEPARATED THE LIGHT FROM THE DARKNESS: Genesis. by RAYE

"He remembers advice he gave Kehinde two years ago when things were hard for her and Tomi: to own up to her part in it. Like so much advice it was easier given than acted on. What is his own part in this now? Tenderness, consideration, to try to see Sadako as she sees herself? The credible and winsome words assemble themselves in his mind but there's the stubborn gap between what he is able to think and what he is able to do."

(Teju Cole, Tremor. New York: Random House, 2023, p 31)

The first thing to say, after such a long time away from this place, is that when I was in my twenties I made a point of not missing sunsets. My twenties were not perfect times but were, I'd guess with hindsight, as good as anyone else's of my time. I saw so many things, travelled to so many different places, bonded with so many people in real life - the bonds I was subsequently too lazy or messed-up not to let expire - and yes, there was always light of different angles and dimensions.

The problem is that my twenties took place in the decade 1984-94, when computers were ludicrously huge and primitive and what would become the World Wide Web was still getting its nappies changed. There were no distractions the same as there weren't any in the time of the Brontës or Dickens, so that they could set off on long arduous walks yet be back for lunch and ready to spend an afternoon writing some of the greatest literature anyone has ever written. They had no conception of checking what A had said about B and if anybody criticised them, that was okay because they were almost always family or friends. Real ones.

It was not a situation where, rather than the liberating expression of one's self to the wider world, you found yourself in a less forgiving virtual prison cell, endlessly being scrutinised and mocked by strangers - not "friends" - and being encouraged to confirm your deepest and dire suspicions of inadequacy of self.

Desperate for validation and sedatives: validation meaning being permitted to remain alive, perpetrated by strangers who are most likely as fucked up as you or more so but somehow belittling others to the point of self-extinction makes them feel better about themselves. And art as the ultimate sedative, short of morphine pumps, not to delight, stimulate, electrify or move but simply to comfort with bland obeisance; all over the place we now see art being purposedly rebranded as soothing, uplifting, meditative pabulum for troubled and most likely mythical mood mums. To nullify, rather than to move, the patient.

Don't give them any art that might shock them out of sterile acceptance, oh dear Lord no, please, leave us alone...

Well, to paraphrase Howard Beale, I'm not going to leave you alone, and I mean that in both its important senses. I came back here to tell you about this extraordinary new record called "Genesis." (that period is key) by RAYE, which is the greatest and most important British pop single since "Unfinished Sympathy" by Massive Attack.

"Genesis." not only makes me gasp in circular repetitious wonder in the same way that "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "It's A Sin" - two of its indirect ancestors - once provoked more youthful gasps. I suppose you could say that I'm glad I lived long enough to be able to witness it, and for the longest of times the odds on that happening were less than good.

Because I am certainly not here to diss the internet, to misquote Destiny's Child from a generation ago (but oh, how confidently the spirit of Beyoncé walks as supporting angel through "Genesis."'s tunnel). Oh no. The internet saved my life. I was prematurely widowed in August 2001 and began this blog at the end of that same year as an attempt to dig a tunnel out of my Hell. I was in a mess. Everything that RAYE talks about here, about the sad little sinner whom she sees sin the mirror and the Devil working hard like her liver - well, that was me in the very early noughties (hers must be the most disturbing "Give me a kiss" I've heard outside the work of Throbbing Gristle).

But because I have a crucial safety valve in my brain which bleeps KEEP GOING whenever the thought of ceasing upon the midnight with no pain sprang to mind - so yes, I didn't want to be alive either but neither did I want to die with a fistful of pills (that old man river, he just keeps rolling along); ask my friend of the time T, whom I rang one sunny Saturday morning after repeatedly playing heads and tails - heads I take an overdose of the cocktail of barbiturates available to me at the time, tails I go and see T in Walthamstow - and she'd laugh and say I KNEW he would come out and see me; he made that decision - I persisted, and eventually thrived, and then another blogger in Toronto was directed to my writing, and only a few years later I married that blogger - I flew out to Toronto for the wedding! - and retrieved my life.

Anyway, "Genesis.", which begins with a rhythmic monologue that sounds a bit Kae Tempest-y but over a much more patient and subtle musical backdrop; gradually RAYE builds up her stockpile of anguish and pain, convinced that she must now hate herself because of what strangers of many stripes have done to her, but just as her recitative is about to reach a cathartic climax she steps back, and confesses that she needs some light, and not just for her either.

At this point she goes into a sequence of high-pitched scatting which reminds me of the singer and pianist Rose Murphy - "the girl with the pale pink voice" they used to call her - whose biggest hit was "Busy Line," a song in which she attempts to telephone her lover without success, only to discover that the reason why his 'phone was off the hook was because he was screwing somebody else in the bedroom.

"Calling men who don't give a fuck about me..."

But then the song dramatically shifts pace and becomes strident yet sinister post-Timbaland R&B which, structurally and harmonically, makes me think of (of all unlikely precedents) Propaganda; there is a similar, damaged and perhaps pre-emptively ruined grandeur at work here. It is dramatic, bold and theatrical - RAYE's "hey"s an odd but logical bridge between Paula Yates and Kendrick Lamar - but then it zooms in like a Google street map of Heartbreak Place; to the abuser Depression, which eomes calling whether you want it or not and which takes EVERY LITTLE BIT OF STRENGTH YOU HAVE WITHIN YOU to fight it off and send it away - to the hideous British disease of trying to tell everybody you're sinking but index finger to the lips, tut tut decorum, hang on in quietened desperation, hence the whisky, and the pills, and there are also hints that this is a follow-on from the scenario of "Escapism" - trading the back of the nightclub for the bathroom floor - and that this is all secondary to multiple fiendish betrayals, not only of arrogant exes but the music industry predators who kept her hanging on a string for six years and one of whom did far, far worse even than that...

Hence, what's the BLOODY POINT as she thinks of the other fuck-ups - most sorely her former schoolmate who took her own life - and then ups the ante as incrementally and irreversibly as Lennon did on "Imagine," bearing witness to humanity's imminent self-destruction, crying and CRYING WHAT IS THE SODDING POINT OF TRYING TO CARRY ON AND DO ANYTHING...

...and all the while, she keeps wanting the light, the light, real light, not the dim one at the epicentre of her iPhone, knowing that if she keeps praying, pushing, the darkness must break - "The only thing with which darkness cannot co-exist is the light"...because she will otherwise end, and so will we, and how many more days of pain, HOW MANY MORE

and then:

"The final revelation is at hand! I have seen the shattering fulgurations of ultimate clarity! The light is impending! I bear witness to the LIGHT!"

(Howard Beale, Network, 1976)

I haven't yet spoken about the video for "Genesis." - there are two; the more recent one is a lyric video which features RAYE performing the song onstage at what looks like the Streatham Hill Theatre...

...I mean, how many more CLUES do you need?...

...and the main music one, co-directed by RAYE herself and Otis Dominique, is so compelling that I have to keep watching and absorbing it. Much of its first two-thirds, specifically the theatrical sequence, makes me think of the waking nightmares I experienced for several months following a nearly life-ending operation at St George's Hospital six summers ago* - in particular the harsh red (read Satanic) backdrop. Who is in that audience? The ageing, toothless, smugly popcorn-munching man represents music industry dinosaurs. The empty seat where her schoolmate should be sitting. The blokey indie git who angrily gets up and walks out of the theatre when blood and explosions begin to make themselves known. The mass audience of would-be hipsters who don't care about you, are only ticking you off their bucket list and are perfectly incapable of feeling or communicating anything.

(*full details of that, the worst experience of my life, can be found in chapter 32 of my 100-chapter book Uncorrected Bound Proof, which I wrote over seven months last year and which it would be very nice if a publisher could pick up on it, thank you. Each chapter is based on, or inspired by, a song in my Your Top Songs 2022 Spotify playlist, and that particular chapter has to do with "Shake It" by Charli xcx and others, which is a fairly accurate audio representation of what I experienced.)

And yet, when RAYE gives the signal for the light to break, they suddenly begin cheering, standing up and cheering as though humanity has been saved.

The light. The train (to Jordan?).

The platform, oh my fucking Christ she's at Selhurst!

Singing jazz, in and around the station, dropping into what looks like a care home for the elderly and then a school, and OH MY GOD I SEE WHAT SHE'S DOING HERE

Selhurst being the nearest train station to the BRIT School, which RAYE briefly attended around the time of 2011...

AROUND THE TIME SHE DIED, GIVE ME A KISS, OH MERCILESS WHISKY...

Well yes it's Amy, of COURSE it's Amy, it's a parallel universe where she's perfectly happy to sing jazz, do shifts at the Hideaway, with no trendies or hipsters standing, with trilby hats and folded arms, demanding to be impressed...

...so this song COULD be interpreted as an extended endeavour at elegy and resurrection, but far more importantly than that RAYE in the daylight is actually HAPPY, for the first real time in I can't guess how long. Look at her in the video, charming the old folks, hugging the kids and pointing the camera out to them, and everybody is palpably having a damned good time.

All the while she sings out to the people who really make the nation go round - "GOD BLESS THE NHS!" (and this NHS worker particularly appreciates that, not to mention her demand to "let the pay RISE"). To all of you good but unhip people who toil away with scant recognition or reward, she proclaims, may they also be in receipt of The Light. The single mother crying to her sister over the telephone - note the reversal of the song's opening scenario where she is still on the 'phone but actually communicating with genuine people who love her and can care for her - yes, she deserves The Light.

You know what? Maybe RAYE is singing to all of us, to show us that there is indeed Another Way, a way which we perhaps always knew was there but allowed the blackly-holed sun of social media to blot out for a time. She's saying - "THIS IS WHAT I'M TALKIN' 'BOUT!" - that it's so, so much better for the troubled mind to have a relatively small audience who will absolutely understand and empathise with what you're saying, than a huge, impassive audience determined to understand nothing and undermine everything that makes life worth owning. Humans are by nature social animals who like to be happy and together - not separated and converted into robotic receptacles by solvent morose mavericks who find people an inconvenience.

That if you want to know where "the real London" has gone, don't hang around Shoreditch with its bemused tourists and disappointed hipsters - go down to Streatham High Road, preferably round about the Becmead Avenue junction, on Saturday lunchtime and see just what is missing elsewhere (to misquote Jim Kerr); bustling with people who smile hello to you and help you across the road if you're a bit faint. All colours, all nations, all creeds are to be found here, which was why I left my hometown in the first place (plus a great library, where my wife just happens to work on Sunday afternoons!).

Ultimately, though, the lesson of "Genesis." is that it's a cry of help as much as a roar of reassurance. You have to realise that you need to go back down that long, exhausting highway and rediscover the piece of your heart you left at the side of the road so many decades ago, or maybe your parents or teachers or bosses cut it off for you. Then you have to try to reconnect it to your Self, which you might have only this lifetime to come to terms with. If you're going to dig a tunnel out of Hell, as the late Mark Fisher once remarked, you have to start digging from where you are ("I’m tryna end up anywhere except from where I been").