When Art Blooms, from Music to Literature

I live for life’s blooms. You know that place in that one song where it just opens up, like a tightly coiled spring suddenly released, a party popper exploding in slow motion, a flower blooming under hyperlapse, suddenly unfurling gorgeous pedals? When every little theme, sound, and motif in the song comes together for this glorious blast of sound? That tinny tone you heard in the first verse? The drums draped in reverb, filling in the background? That vocal sample you could barely hear? Well, now they’re all back, in this sudden yet inescapably well-timed amalgamation of sounds that bowls you over, causing you to stop in your tracks and simply let it wash over you.
In the Vampire Weekend song “Run”, this moment occurs exactly 1 minute and 33 seconds into the song. The driving tempo and punchy synths build upwards and upwards, as lead singer Ezra Koenig’s voice rises slowly and the background horns bare away, the tension thickening until, at the last moment, as it all hangs in the balance, the song blooms. Koenig belts the word “Run”, the instrumentals swell and the synths arpeggiate, and it all washes over you. They follow this with a solid, structured chorus that establishes the pattern of the song and makes the explosion of sound every time the titular word comes up a welcome moment. Art is filled with these blossoming moments, and they never leave my mind.
Frank Ocean — My king — jumps straight into a bloom. A signature move of his is opening songs straight into a flourish of sound. Whether the rising strings and bird chirps of “Pink + White”, the pretty opening hook of “Ivy”, or the guitar riffs and impassioned vocals of “Nights”, Frank doesn’t hold back in the first 30 seconds of his songs. His best work seems to just float onwards, propelled by its own beauty and lyrical sincerity; you think he can’t possibly pull out something new and as interesting as the first 30 seconds, and then he does, at the synths drop out and the beat changes, and new vocal effects wash over his buttery voice. The “vibe” of a song will be apparent, but there’s no predicting where it’ll go from then on. I see it like those super-sped up videos of orchids blooming — a slow, careful process, a bloom, but sped up and stretched so far that somehow it lasts a few minutes.
Ocean breaks time, where making a “bloom” last longer somehow makes it feel like it’s rushing past your car window in Tokyo at night, awash in neon. (I could write a whole story on that video — it’s exceptional) His strategy makes a true explosion of sound in one of his songs a rare and exceptional moment. The last 45 seconds of “Ivy” crackle away, like sparks from a campfire. After slowly building up to this climax, crooning precisely over reverb-soaked guitars, he screams out in an inhuman voice, “Dreaming, dream on“, the last word echoing into the distance. It feels like you’ve been through something after listening to “Ivy” — like your soul has been ripped from your body and you’re floating through space, the oxygen-less cold creeping over your skin.
The power of a “bloom” strengthens songs in a different way as well. In the band HAIM’s first album, the exceptional Days are Gone, one of the best songs, “Honey & I”, is fully propelled by restraint, by just barely holding back an explosion of sound.
The air is thick with tension throughout the song, pulled taut until it feels like something must give, like there must be a release, a climax. But the Haim sisters just keep plugging along, chimes twinkling in the background, chords repeating, vocal patterns relied on. The closest the song every gets to really getting all this constrained energy out is 2 minutes and 50 seconds into the song, when a pounding drum line represents the frustration of every listener who wished that the song would fall into a nice little chorus. HAIM’s greatest power over their 2 stellar albums is their restraint, knowing when to hold back a chorus, when to carefully compose a verse and when to let it all loose. They highlight that even simply the spectre of a bloom can carry a song.
A book blooming is incredible. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Milkman’s entire family history all comes together in one glorious realization as he hears the children’s song sung over and over in the rural Virginia village he visits to find his true lineage. Sitting under a tree, exhausted from his travels, “Milkman’s scalp beg[ins] to tingle,” (Morrison 302) as the fraying strands of his past whirl around in the air. He reaches out to grab these milky ropes of identification, collecting name after name, “memoriz[ing].. all of what they sang… Jake… Ryna… Solomon,” (303) and slowly piecing together his heritage. All the moments when a white child heard about their Aunt Georgina, their Grandfather James, their distant cousin who was friends with the president, all come at once for Milkman, his family tree blooming faster and faster as he paints his own story, “excited as a child confronted with boxes and boxes of presents under the skirt of a Christmas tree.” (304)

This moment is stunning for the layers upon layers of grime that are instantaneously removed from Milkman’s eyes in his vision of his family, the reinforcement of the power of verbal storytelling and cataloguing for oppressed people, but most of all the illumination of vicious added legacy of slavery in the destruction of history for African-Americans. One of the cruelest long-lasting effects of slavery is how it erased families and left children bereft of a past, isolated and stuck in a systematically racist country without ancestors standing behind them, in mind or person. As Milkman’s story blooms around him in Shalimar, the power of legends, songs, names, myths, families, and “missing pieces” (304) slotting together becomes distinctively evident.
Mark Bradford’s enigmatic multi-media paintings bloom violently. Paint splatters off the canvas, grooves run through the dappled surface, and deep, serrated gashes cut through through the image. The process is filled with pain, furiously painting and then collaging only to rip it all apart and slice it through with box cutters — addition by subtraction.

I heard you got arrested today is a convulsing, heaving, black, white, and blood red mass. It blooms outwards and inwards, billowing in a non-existent wind. Your eyes trace the lines and gaping black holes that litter the piece, recalling redlined urban streets and vacant lots, a shotgun blast, filled with shrapnel, and the back of grievously injured and publicly whipped slaves. This is no pretty orchid carefully flowering. This is a mess, a tragedy, a strangely beautiful depiction of shattered shards of glass and torn flesh, of ugly racism and pseudoscience-backed genocide, of tattered newspapers, broken families, and of flashing police lights announcing death. Hatred blooms from this work, hatred from white mouths, white eyes, white whips, white paper, white chains, and white power. As an equal and opposite reaction, Bradford creates painfully necessary art and gives local communities the ability to flourish through programs that provide life-skills, access to housing, and education for foster kids in Los Angeles, his hometown.
To bloom is to intricately unfold, to have everything become abundantly, obviously, confoundingly clear. Things suddenly click into place, but it’s not exactly as you thought. Square pegs in circular holes, grotesque approximations, and the illusion of completion. Rarely does everything come together simply. A minor chord hinting at future problems in a triumphant chorus, the looming prophecy in the back of every greek hero’s mind, and the lethargic release that leads up to a bloom. This imperfection just makes the blooms that much more special. All great media, whether literature, film, music, or art, revolves around a bloom. Holding back one, letting it loose quickly and consistently, within the work, the viewer’s mind, or both, defined by the lack of one, or slowly building up to one. When do we bloom as people? When we blossom, when we flower, when we let ourselves go, when we leap into the great unknown. Let it all go, let it all unfold around you, and revel in your complexity and singularity. There is no flower like you, and by god do you have gorgeous petals.
