Tele Fresco - Act 2: Elation (Directed by 2 Nice)

Tele Fresco - Act 2 from Chuck Schwarzbeck AKA 2 Nice on Vimeo.

"Joy yes, joy is fine, but enjoyment is possessive." -  Geoffrey Hill

The psychedelic, syrupy swirls - sonic and visual - of Tele Fresco's and 2 Nice's second installment of Love Letters bespeak a type of bacchanalian revelry, as if commingling the lush synth's of Benzel's "Fallin' Love" with the hedonistic purr of new Gucci.  The plot is common and easily fits a self-referential reading: strangers at a party, a lilting voice breathing upon an ear, soft caresses.  Yet, more than a fond recollection of bygone nights, this hazy memory is punctuated by caustic wit.  Shirking simplistic depictions of romance that the project's semi-Romantic title suggests, the duo carve out a creative space that sarcastically rebukes a culture captivated by love (and twerking to the undulations of an anarchical flag) to pose an ethical question embedded in Act 1: are we culpable for our emotions?
If you haven't watched Act 1, please do so now before continuing.


There are many ways to construct melody, but one effective method is to link a series of sub-phrases that respond to and develop one another in such a way that the antecedent is taken up anew by its consequent, reframing the original utterance in a sort of "call and response" technique.  Building upon a single theme and repeating it in variations with changes in melody, pitch, counterpoint, rhythm, timbre, etc, this technique is the cornerstone of music, from classical pieces such as Mozart's Piano Sonata in A K. 331 to improvisational jazz.  Interestingly, at the root of this technique is a grounding in dialectical movements from the thesis to the anthesis.  It is through this interweaving of thesis-antithesis that a solution or synthesis is reached, a crowning union of the two opposites in which there is no future dialectical movement and the variations come to a type of accord (we find interesting parallels between the dialectic relationship and the romantic relationship).
Whereas most musicians in contemporary music contain their variations to a single song, Tele Fresco echoes compositional elements of classical music in building slight variations into the electric symphony that is Love Letters. Exemplary of this technique is the monotone call of Frank Sinatra's "Come Fly With Me" in Act 1.  In Act II, the listless call of Sinatra has been warped into the sultry cry of Justin Bieber's "Don't cry, we don't need no wings to fly", sampled from his 2011 song "As Long As You Love Me" which features Big Sean, a choice one can only take as riddled with irony.

It would be easy to say that the inclusion of Bieber is jocular, meant to deride his obvious lack of talent, narcissism, and the romantic implications of the song.  However, there is more incisive focus than mere mockery. The call has been repeated here. We must notice that Sinatra's pathos-filled desperation has been changed in sorts by pitch and melody. In effect, they are the same offers, stemming from the same source.  Perhaps what is most interesting, however, is temporal resonance that spans from Sinatra to Bieber in their equal fascination with flight.  Flight, to transcend human limitations, is a type of transcendence (think of the images of popular media that incorporate this motif, from Disney's Aladin to the more rowdy fetish of sex with the swank stewardess in the cramped urinal of a plane).  The tacit romantic promise in both variations is that, through love, one can overcome the severity of the human condition, achieving bliss, or in dialectic terms a perfection.
In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the Kierkegaardian pseudonym, Johannes Climacus notes that to fly, or to be in a state of transcendence, is the only place where the system, his derisive term for Hegelian dialectics, will find its readers.  But humans, as such, are fundamentally only able to leap, flying through the air, only to land:

If a dancer could leap very high, then we would marvel at him.  But even if he could leap as high as any dancer had ever done, if he then pretended to be able to fly—why, let laughter then have him.  For to leap means by definition to belong to the earth and to have to respect the laws of gravity, so that to leap is merely something momentary; but to fly means to be released from tellurian conditions, something which is reserved for winged creatures and, perhaps, also for moon-dwellers—and perhaps, perhaps it is only there that the system will find its true readers.  (124)

To think that one has flown, is to suggest that love has entered some type of perfection, a perfect union of sorts, if only a momentary one.  To fly in the face of love, then, has ethical consequences as Kierkegaard further explicates in Works of Love: "when a person makes the mistake of calling something love that actually is self-love, when he loudly protests that he cannot live without the beloved but does not want to hear anything about the task and requirement of love to deny oneself and to give up this self-love of erotic love."  2 Nice's color editing and layering techniques interestingly hide and distort the face of his female lead, a marked contrast to the opening scenes in which her face is plainly seen.  In a way, she is the object of our gaze, in that she is eroticized and made to exist in this moment only for our enjoyment.  She is our enjoyment personified, emphasized poignantly by Big Sean's "like wow (Oh God) / Camera's pointed shoot, / Ask me what's my best side, I stand back and point at you" which collapses the gap between lover and beloved to an extension-less point that is the a-cosmic self.  In this video of intense enjoyment, Tele Fresco and 2 Nice have painted a portrait of loneliness.