Grandiose and Mythic, Beautiful and Dangerous: On Sean Avery Medlin's "808s & Otherworlds"

Sean Avery Medlin | 808s & Otherworlds: Memories, Remixes, and Mythologies | Two Dollar Radio | 2021 | 140 Pages

Sean Avery Medlin’s debut collection, 808s & Otherworlds (Two Dollar Radio, 2021), is set up like a deluxe box set, the kind that collects a bevy of best tracks and unreleased B-sides and packages it with new art and extended liner notes full of stories verging on myth. It’s a smart move, and a natural one, considering how musical Medlin’s work is. There’s the title (a reference to both the drum machine and the album 808s & Heartbreak) and the many apostrophes to Ye (FKA Kanye), Playboi Carti, trap and emo. And then there’s the four-bar structure that underlies many of the poems, such that even when set on the page in big prose chunks they have the rhyming sinuousness of a freestyle no amount of formatting can suppress. The choice to put them down unlineated may seem strange, but it serves to point out how page-based poetry conventions—along with other conventions of, say, gender or race—are inexact methods for capturing a fluid, complex self. 

Medlin (he/they) isn’t a fan of borders, though they’ve felt their life defined by them. 808s reflects an eclectic, ravenous consciousness aware of, but not beholden to, restrictions. Along with a wide range of cultural referents—Amaud Jamal Johnson aptly calls Medlin the “[l]ovechild of Sun Ra and Sailor Moon”—the poems encompass an exhilarating range of formal engagement. Each of the book’s six sections (besides the last, an excerpt from a stage play that doesn’t quite earn its inclusion) bills itself as a record; each opens with a poem titled “new amerika,” and is anchored by another titled “CORPUS MEUM.” Between them are stuffed various odes, contrapuntals, persona poems, instructions, epistles, poems that run vertically, erasure, lyric essay, and more. In a book that looks as closely at the Silver Surfer and Lil Uzi Vert as it does at Pokémon and Afropessimism, it feels as apt as it is ambitious to play as many formal cards as Medlin does. If a work of art is good to the degree that its form and content harmonize, then forms should be as various as content, right? 

The book isn’t just some textual version of Jimmy Fallon’s Wheel of Musical Impressions, though. Its subject might be construed as ‘the arbitrary strictness of identities’ but its poems are anything but arbitrary; unlike, say, taboos about interracial dating, tackled early on in “Iggy & Carti (prelude)”:

When Iggy & Carti hold hands: my college friend says I’m not into white guys, another Blacked video is uploaded, nonBlackgirls tweet my Black boyfriend said that I can say n****, their boyfriends respond Blackgirls just jealous;

The litany—which reminds us that fetishism is a form of racism—“vacuum[s] back” the speaker to their own relationship, with a girlfriend whose “acne is confederate red.” The relationship wavers between being sincere, performative, and alienating; however, the landscape of first crushes, already tricky due to identity’s fluidity in youth, is one strewn with the ordnance of prejudice: 

my Father & I knock on her door
to confess that I ran a few miles that night,
to lay naked and curious, both of us too afraid to have actual intercourse
not because her dad would call me n*****, but because the unknown is
simply terrifying

Not all of the poems are equally successful (e.g. the contrapuntals don’t always unveil new or surprising aspects via multidirectional readings) but many are quick and sharp as a matador. Take, for instance, “FURVA LUX (Black Light),” which bears many of the hallmarks of Medlin’s more electric poems. Popular musician? Check. Icon of a certain kind of Black performance? Check. A layering of sound so thick and rich it feels concupiscent as ice cream? (“Plum purple dreads shake like pythons from the scalp of our protagonist.”) Check. A rendering of this particular subject that makes it grandiose and mythic, beautiful and dangerous? (“Before free will was dreamed of, he steamrolled beyond the fixed heavens, pioneered ego and self. Lil Uzi Vert, pridesick rockstar, stood before his Maker and said, // I too deserve to be praised.”) Check. 

Aside from the subject matter of the poem and the way Medlin transmutes it from lesser pop-rap ore into a legend out of which an ineluctable and magnificent subjectivity arises, there are methods afoot, here and elsewhere in the book, that help Medlin do their best work. Part of it is choosing someone like Lil Uzi Vert, whose aesthetic is a hodgepodge of US/Western cultural streams—emo, rap, face tattoos, body modification, androgyny. His is a performance of Blackness (and Black celebrity) that isn’t normative. Medlin themselves fits this bill as well, due in large part to their peripherality to many of the aspects that seem, at a glance, to define them. They are Black but grew up in suburban Arizona. They are male-bodied but non-binary. They like rap but also anime, comic books, and hardcore punk (“had a septum & steel gauges / welded to the pit”). They are from the US but are displaced within it, partly by the dispossessive legacies of racism and partly by the neo-imperial machinations of the state (their father was in the Air Force). Medlin seems to express if not embody a kind of ‘both/and’ relationship to much of the objects, themes, and facts in their life, being both part of and not, central and marginal to the different aspects of identity that help make them legible to others. 

When their work mixes the disparate together—as they do in “FURVA LUX” when Lil Uzi Vert is deified with the grandiose language of Revelations and the technicolor gestures of anime—a new, exhilarating iconography is forged. Methods from one cultural tradition are fused with the subject matter of another, and in this, their work takes up the mantle of countless great artists—we might point to Ye, who “flip[ped] the vocals of children’s choirs, Shirley Bassey, Ray Charles, and Curtis Mayfield” into new emotional and musical contexts, though in their more successful moments I’d compare what Medlin is doing to what Langston Hughes was after, in welding the blues and poetry together, improving our understanding and appreciation of both. Medlin, along with other contemporary Black creators (Marlin M. Jenkins and Thundercat spring to mind), is striving to expand what can be canonically Black. They are “embrac[ing],” as Hanif Abdurraqib puts it, “the flawed fluidity of [Blackness and its varied performances].” Both rap and emo, BET and Japanese cartoons, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Incredible Hulk.  

In a recent essay in BOMB, Hafizah Geter writes that “in its original and Blackest manifestation, Camp is a way of looking, one that shifts whose gaze has power as well as who can be at the center of the political project we call beauty.” Medlin is nothing if not existentially, and out of necessity, engaged in the work of reconsidering what, societally, qualifies as beautiful (in “What It’s Like to Be a Suburban Black Demiboy” they write “i open my closet to decide which costume / will make me feel safe /”). One of the central tactics of Camp is exaggeration (Sontag calls it “the love of the exaggerated'”), and Medlin exercises this well in poems like “FURVA LUX” and “How to Make Trap Music” and in poems that reconsider Blackness and social existence through the lens of glossy, hypertrophied characters like Smoochum or Sailor Moon. The hyperbolic proportions, the “leaning into the absurd” and “the hypocrisies buried in the absurdities” all help craft poems in which alternate realities memorably surge forth. In “Darrien’s from the Hidden Cloud” for instance, Medlin reimagines an encounter as common as it is lethal—young black man held up by white cop—in the generic conventions of a samurai showdown. After “Darrien swiveled into stance, standing stiller than a mountain’s peak”:

There was a sound that left the sky too empty to be a gunshot, hot bursts of blue light waves, and a bright, blinding flash. One boy, watching from across the strip mall, said that once he could see again, the cop’s pistol lay split on the sidewalk, cut evenly down the barrel in two pieces, as if the firearm had dotted lines, and Darrien, scissors.

Medlin deftly and epically inverts the power dynamic and our expectations, switching the polarities while calling attention to the original configuration, which leaves it intact and all the more egregious. 

Not every poem leans into the Camp of self-aggrandizing hip-hop or the impossible smoothness of animation. Medlin considers the history of settlement (and dispossession) in the US Southwest, pens an ode to their sister as she performs her own atypical version of Blackness, and interrogates the complex figure of Ye (“lonely heartsore son of Black academia”) who looms over the whole collection like Ezra Pound over 20th century literature: volatile and influential, progenitor and pariah. These poems—more personal, more searching—have lots of emotional and intellectual heft, though when Medlin moves from the grandiose to the sincere, they sometimes lapse into, instead of freshening, cliché. (One poem, in responding to Ye’s suggestion that slavery was “a choice,” ends on the line “we are [our ancestors] wildest dreams”; it may be true, but doesn’t seem like the jab that would stun someone dexterous enough to make a confession a cosmic revelation: “Sometimes I take all the shine, talk like I drank all the wine/[…] No half-truths, just naked minds, caught between space and time.”) Medlin’s debut may feel a bit uneven at times (as a box set may, when it brings together both the best cuts and what didn’t make it into the other albums), but it also dazzles. Medlin can cut a phrase into a prism so it splits the everyday into a spray of light. “countries stand because we bent” they write, about this nation which their father served and their ancestors built and which is more fortunate than it knows to have writers like Medlin expanding its understanding of how people actually live and daily survive inside it.