Aaaaaaaaaah, love, isn’t it? Don’t you love love? Don’t you love love, where you finally find the one who allows you to live your life and not make any sacrifices. Love, where you don’t need to make any effort at all, just vibe? Love that allows you just be yourself, right? Love, where you and your soulmate just sit in each other’s company and feel? Love, the kind you clean up with a mop and bucket, like the lost catacombs of Egypt, only God knows where we stuck it?
Or maybe your love is the passionate sort?? Maybe your love is defined by long periods of anger and trauma interspersed jarringly with incredibly lascivious and incredibly loud sex? Your love is broken cutlery and broken backs? Your love is screaming in anger but occasionally screaming in pleasure? You have one of those steamy relationships like they do in the movies, right? Your relationship is sometimes that argument scene in ‘Marriage Story‘, sometimes they’re outside the house doing a ‘STEEEEEEEEELLAAAAAAAAAAAA‘, but sometimes it’s the opening scene in ‘Betty Blue’, you know warram saying?? Seriously, the only place I can find that clip is on porn sites! Hot! Spicy! Nobody else understands! They only hurt you because they love you, right?
No, but seriously though, I’m going to write the rest of this post under the assumption that you’re more than 17 years old. If you still have this idealised and Hollywood commodified version of ‘love’, I do actually envy your naivete. I miss it, to be brutally honest. I would love to still believe that true relationships are based around an almost supernatural magnetism between two people, possibly decreed by the Gods of the Fates. I miss that rush of hormonal idiocy that convinces you that every human being has a singe soulmate, the cosmic yin to your metaphysical yang. And by wonderful spiritual coincidence, your destined life partner just happens to work at the Aldi just down the street. But love moves in mysterious ways! Remember Jane? Her One True Love was apparently her weird uncle Colin. Oh, but Jane says that nobody’s allowed to talk about that.
Unfortunately – in every sense – I will be 40 years old in two weeks time. I’m basically dead, and by my age you can’t help but have a more realistic view of the materialistic conditions that drive a relationship. Sometimes, you just think people are really awesome, and want to spend as much time with them as possible. Sometimes, a person just makes everything feel better and makes you feel confident in yourself like nobody you’ve ever experienced. Sometimes a person is just freaking smoking hot and the sex with them is celestial. Sometimes a person is as ugly as the back end of a fridge but the sex with them is celestial. Sometimes, you wouldn’t be able to afford the rent without their half*. Maybe their income has afforded you something close to financial stability, and without their economic embrace you’d be left exposed to the whims of capitalism like everyone else. Are all of these relationships ‘love’? Sure, why not? ‘Love’ is an abstract concept that has no real definition and means different things to different people, call whatever you want ‘love’.
(*seriously, does anyone feel like moving in with me so I can get half my rent paid? We’ll get married if you want, I don’t care, I just love this flat but the costs are killing me. Seriously, I’ll go to your friends’ weddings with you and visit your parents at Christmas. I’ll tell people what a beautiful little princess you are and how I fell in love with you when we first locked eyes, even though you’re a gross looking warthog with odour issues. Whatever, dude)
This is an actual adult speaking though, and here are a few truths about ‘love’:
- If you feel like you don’t have to put any effort in or make any sacrifices, it’s because the other person is working so hard and sacrificing so much. Maybe try acknowledging that? They probably really resent you.
- ‘Soulmates’ aren’t some nebulous concept decreed by the universe. I’m not saying they don’t exist (again, undefined concept, call whomever you want your ‘soulmate’. My ‘soulmate’ is this plug I have in Longsight that can sort me out a gram of MDMA at any time), but it’s something you need to work at becoming.
- Do don’t have a ‘tempestous’ relationship, where both of your passions for each other often boil over into anger. I’m guessing one or both of you have a drinking problem.
- Close your eyes and picture your idea of ‘love’? OK, open them. Be honest, you just pictured the dance sequence from ‘Beauty and the Beast‘, didn’t you? No? Ah, was it the “Aaaah wish aah knew howda quit ‘choo!!” bit from ‘Brokeback Mountain’? There you go.
- If your idea of love doesn’t come from the movies, it probably comes from your parents. Yeah, I know! You are so fucked!
I still get these feelings sometimes. Usually – and almost exclusively – when I first meet someone that I feel a spark with, that initial electricity is still deliciously overwhelming. Jamila Woods (34) is mature enough to even rationally question those first sparks of chemistry:
You smoke a lotta weed (Like a lot)
You said you feelin’ me (Like a lot)
I can’t stand the smell of it
I breathe it in it makes me sick
You got a lotta hair (Like a lot)
You hold me in your prayers (Like a lot)
I don’t know how I feel about it
Still don’t know how to feel about it…It bugs me but I do it for ya
Bugs
These initial hesitations eventually come down, but even then Jamila is sure to temper her excitement. There’s something happening here, but let’s not go crazy, let’s not make a whole thing out of this:
I’m fallin’ hard for you, but I know I don’t show it
Tiny Garden
I’ll take your love for me, but I know I don’t own it
It’s not gonna be a big production
It’s not butterflies or fireworks
Said it’s gonna be a tiny garden
But I’ll feed it everyday
And so begins the story and…
I’m sorry, fuck me, Tiny Garden is so fucking good that it often knocks me sideways a bit. Sorry, I’ll get my composure back in a second.
(breathes)
OK, I’m good:
And so begins the story and analysis of a human relationship as experienced and vocalised through an actual intelligent adult. It’s a concept album of sorts, with the story of what could be understandably described as love narrated from its cautious beginnings, then the work that both parties put in to learn each other’s way of being (“We don’t gotta hurry up/You ain’t gotta be the one/We were just rehearsin’ babe, you know this ain’t the game”), the surrender to love (“I will go down for you/Covered in the mud, I’d kiss the ground for you“), the slow and sad disintegration of the relationship (“I fear you are not a good person/But I loved you anyway/I wonder if I’m a good person/Since I always let you stay”) and the healing afterwards . Hanging over everything is the fact that this is all just a part of life. You will meet people, you will fall in love with people, you will break up with people. Relationships aren’t a game where you’re both rushing to ‘win’, it’s not a ‘failure’ if you don’t ‘complete’ the game by getting married and having kids. It irritates me when people respond to a break up by claiming they’ve “wasted [X] years of my life!” It’s only a waste if you hated every second of it! If you were happy for [X] years then it was a success! Relationships are about two people making each other feel better about the world, if you believe the purpose of love is to tie each other down greedily and then produce more humans/workers then my God you’re down bad for capitalism!
You know who taught me that thing about relationships never being a waste of time? My fucking ex wife! I miss all my exes…
Don’t feel sorry if you leave
Wreckage Room
Love don’t mean you saving me
Don’t feel sorry if you leave
Tell our story differently
“But Alex!”, I hear you bray as you look up from that schoolgirl manga comic that you only read for the plot, “Isn’t this close to the kind of self-centred liberal bullshit that you criticised Janelle Monae for??”
Firstly: please, I beg of you, swallow your food before talking to me. Secondly: I’m not criticising artists who write about themselves – fuck, can you imagine if I banned that?? – I’m criticising art that isn’t saying anything. Woods poetically and beautifully dissects the very meaning of a relationship – good – Janelle has lots of sex and just talks about it – boring.
Oh, and don’t forget about the bangers. There are bangers on this album that Janelle’s latest simply can’t touch.
As always, that’s the most important thing. All of this writing bullshit is just retconning and intellectualising songs that pop so hard that they gave me a stiffy.
Jamila has released eleven poems, been on five anthologies, done two chapbooks (whatever they are) and even one play. But she has released three albums, all featured on Necessary Evil, so that means:
Necessary Evil 
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