By Edward Clark
T. S. Eliot and Earl Sweatshirt (real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) are both visionaries. This claim is contentious – many find Eliot’s writing frustrating or pretentious and Kgositsile’s abstract delivery and style of hip-hop alienating. Nevertheless, both artists redefined what their craft could be, pioneering a new lens for poetry in interwar and modern eras alike. This essay considers how Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” both use abstract form, language and structure to express feelings of aimlessness after loss: Eliot representing the ‘lost generation’ of young people following the First World War, and Kgositsile dealing with depression and addiction following the death of his grandmother. Today marks a decade since Kgositsile released the ten-minute “solace” on YouTube channel dar Qness, accompanied only by the caption ‘music from when i hit the bottom and found something’. No rollout, no marketing. Split into five distinct sections like The Waste Land, the song delves into Kgositsile’s struggles with addiction, depression and grief. “solace” seemingly has little in common with Eliot’s masterpiece, a poem which encapsulated the aimlessness of modern twentieth-century society and cemented Eliot as a seminal modernist writer. Although it may appear fruitless to draw comparison between a groundbreaking century-old epic poem and a relatively unknown song released solely on YouTube, analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” suggests the unique role that forward-thinking art plays in conveying perspectives from ‘the bottom’.
As Eliot uses disorienting form to display a frustration with post-war aimlessness as a member of the ‘lost generation’, Kgositsile breaks down traditional hip-hop structure in “solace” to depict his difficulty in dealing with the grief of his grandmother. “solace” is split into five distinct sections, each providing a snapshot of different experiences of depression in loss. Kgositsile’s five-act structure is not only reminiscent of Eliot, but of Aristotle’s Poetics and a dramatic framework which Aristotle influenced – a form which both Eliot and Kgositsile themselves distort. “solace” and The Waste Land thrive on this type of disruption. If Aristotle’s dénouement of the fourth act intended to build towards a climactic conclusion, Kgositsile’s fizzles into depressive ambiance and Eliot’s five acts laugh in the face of structure altogether. Attempting to draw a single narrative between the fragmented voices of the poem does a disservice to the deliberate disorientation of Eliot’s writing. Beyond form, inversion of tradition and the familiar is the foundation of The Waste Land. The poem’s opening line ‘April is the cruellest month’ twists the opening to the General Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which describes how ‘Aprille with his shoures soote’ … ‘engend[er] the flour’ (April with his showers sweet … grow flowers). What represented new life in the Middle Ages is twisted by the 1920s to be lifeless and ‘cruel’. Kgositsile similarly distorts the optimism of April. A sample of Ahmed Jamal’s “April in Paris” is skewed and repeated to sound eerie and unsettling. A celebration of the beauty of spring through jazz is inverted to soundtrack Kgositsile’s lament that he has ‘been alone for the longest’. The rebirth of spring hurts more when stuck in a cyclical pattern of depression.
Where Eliot is constrained to the page, Kgositsile is provided with more opportunities for expression. His slurred, depressed tone leaves the listener with a pit in their stomach; a feeling only accentuated by uses of repetition throughout. The mantra of ‘it’s me and my nibbling conscience … I’m fixin’ to give up’ structurally emphasises Kgositsile’s repeated failure to climb out of the pit of depression which he raps about. Cyclical despondency is at the core of “solace”, the song beginning with a warped voice repeating ‘I’ve been here before’. Depression is not foreign to Kgositsile. A wide emotional range is expressed through instruments alone. The third section of the song lacks vocals altogether, sounding almost optimistic, yet then quickly descends into the darkest section of the track after a brief moment of reprieve. The decision to leave the most up-tempo, brightest moment of the song without vocals is itself reflective of Kgositsile’s low self-esteem – the song’s auditory moment of optimism is saved for when his vocals are absent.
“solace’s” shifts between tones are reminiscent of Eliot’s poetic voice. In part one, The Burial of the Dead, Eliot uses enjambment to quickly change the meaning of his lines. The romantic image of ‘the hyacinth girl’ with ‘arms full’ and ‘hair wet’ turns sour as Eliot writes ‘I could not / Speak, and my ears failed’. Similarly, enjambment is employed at the beginning of part two, A Game of Chess, to create a flowing, confused and overwhelming body of text, reflective of the ‘synthetic perfumes’ Eliot describes. The abstract perspective of the poem disorientates the reader, placing them in Eliot’s aimless shoes. The words ‘troubled, confused’ are initially read as adjectives, leading on from the image of ‘perfumes’, yet as one follows onto the next line it becomes clear that they are intended as verbs. As optimism and pessimism are opposed in The Waste Land and “solace”, so are youth and death. Part one of The Waste Land questions a man, and by proxy the reader, as to whether the ‘corpse … in your garden’ will ‘bloom this year’. Rebirth is juxtaposed with the legacy of conflict and the First World War. How can new life flourish against a backdrop of violence? Kgositsile’s depression prevents him from disconnecting his physical body from his grief: ‘I got my grandmama hands, I start to cry when I see ‘em / ‘Cause they remind me of seein’ her’. At twenty-one, depression and grief lead him to despair, with seemingly no solace in sight. The final lines of the song are hopeless: ‘I’m the youngest old man that ya know’.
Years after The Waste Land’s publishing, Eliot described it as nothing but ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. An untuned ear may describe Kgositsile’s solace in the same way. Both works represent the disgruntled voices of their generations a century apart. As The Waste Land instantly became a classic, its ominous tone connecting with those who connected themselves to a ‘lost generation’, “solace” has connected with thousands of fans around the world who relate to Kgositsile’s potent, free-flowing, faded depression. Yet it gets better. Eliot found happiness and connection in a second marriage later in his life, and Kgositsile is now a father and sober. Both artists pushed their art forms to convey their aimlessness and came out on the other side. Perhaps we can find solace in The Waste Land.
Image credit: genius