Take a spring. Stretch it out. The spring will return to its original form. The more you pull it, the greater the force will be to return the spring to its original state—that is, unless one stretches it too far. That’s Hooke’s Law. Relationships can be like that. One can find that absence makes the heart grow fonder. We can fall more in love with each other, the further the distance we are from each other. Of course, that’s not always the case. Sometimes out of sight, out of mind. The connection has been broken.
Five years have passed since keiyaA’s 2020 debut, Forever, Ya Girl. Her new release takes the name of hooke’s law as its title, but it is not clear why. Her experimental R&B style densely mixes electronic elements with vocal strangeness, performance art, and the kitchen sink into a sophisticated yawp. The music can be painful and ugly to listen to, and often is, as well as seductive and ingratiating.
keiyaA‘s music is difficult to appreciate in traditional ways. The 19 tracks range from the serious to the silly, often in the same song and even the same sentence. There’s lots of sex and violence, life and death, confusion and contentment, all wrapped in exotic sonic cloth. The album begins with a waltz and ends with the instructions to start again in a Möbius loop. Is this Hooke’s Law in action, taking us back, or have we overstretched the spring past its elastic limit? The answer, my friend, is a pastrami on rye sandwich. Huh? Yeah, that’s what I mean. We never really know, but there’s plenty to enjoy and leftovers to ponder.
keiyaA uses the term “pastrami sandwich” as a sexual metaphor in the song “be quiet!!!”, and it works because of its absurdity. She’ll sing straight about life and death, love and pain, poverty and social ills, like a preacher delivering a sermon from the personal (first-person) point of view, then have the language break down into nonsense to show how overwhelmed she is. Her songs are filled with this type of linguistic playfulness that matches up with the instrumental incongruities.
That creates a kind of intimacy as keiyaA professes the details of her erotic desire with her rants for economic justice and spiritual enlightenment. She makes the personal political. She mixes her condemnation of poverty with her yearnings for physical pleasure and a search for the meaning of it all. The specter of death casts a shadow on it all. “You can take the cash and drive yourself to hell / You do not deserve to have me in your life!” she boldly proclaims on “get close 2 me”. Life is painful and then we die, she moralizes, but she knows that’s not all it is. She does not know what it is, though. She’s talking to herself.
Much of hooke’s law is a cry for help from the voice within. keiyaA says she would do anything to see god or find a purpose. Even suicide is an option. She’s not ready to do that. Misery is still a better option than nothingness. Like a spring, she is resilient. The tension she feels makes her stronger, and she has not broken yet.