"Right Now" by Mary J. Blige, Tuesday, September 21, 2021
NO, NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU THE TIME. I first heard Mary J. Blige in 2001 in her song "Family Affair." I didn't care for the song for a few reasons. First, I thought it was too slow. It seemed to go on forever. But the truth is it's pretty average in length. Second, the video was a little shocking to me as a sheltered12-year-old. But the third reason, I'm regretful of: racial bias. Having just rewatched and relistened to "Family Affair," it's really not that slow nor shocking. True, it was a massive hit and thus unavoidable on the radio, but I wonder if I treated this song unfairly because of the way '90s R&B and Hip Hop was treated in my house--change the channel whenever it came on. I remember hearing my dad saying, "This kind of music isn't for us," which may be right sometimes, but I lament my lack of musical diversity when I was growing up. Although Mary J. Blige was off my radar, my friend, Stephen makes a best of the year list, and in 2015, he ranked "Right Now" as his 31st best song of that year. My friend Janelle also wrote commentary on Stephen's list. I listened to Stephen's top 40 of the year, and I was impressed by the Mary J. Blige song. It was smooth in the verse but used disorienting synths in the right places on the chorus. It was wasn't until last year, though, that I started listening to the full album, The London Sessions. I found the album to be a soft, sometimes dreary collection of mid-tempo R&B songs twinged with electronica and smooth jazz. The album has a nice rainy-day feel for it, and it's been pretty rainy lately. "Right Now" is a song in which Mary J. Blige releases her emotion about a lackadaisical lover. She doesn't have time for his games.
YOU TAKE FROM ME, SO WHY YOU HOLDING BACK? Do you ever sit around wondering why friends don't come around here anymore? What was the final straw that made that person fade out of your life? On Chuseok of 2014, a three day harvest festival in Korea in which most of the shops and restaurants are closed, Allan's friend from college, Sarah, was visiting Seoul. She visited some of her friends who were also in Korea, whom Allan had never met, but she ended up spending a lot of time with Allan. The two had been inseparable in college, talking late into the night about books and television shows, arguing the nuances of meaning in the meaningful and the in the trivial. Anyone who witnessed their late-night conversations on the promenade between Miller and Davis Halls or sitting in class together would have wrongly assumed that they were a couple. They were just a couple of English majors. On occasion, those late night conversations might include a boy Sarah had a crush on or a girl Allan admired. "You know," she said one night as they overlooked the dormitories. "Everyone says that we should be together." "What do you think about that?" "No offense," Sarah paused for a moment and looked at the sky. "But I don't see it." Allan gave a soft laugh, as if trying to stifle it from being heard from the rest of empty campus. "You know, in some other timeline, we would be so good for one another," she said. "I know what you mean. It's like we're an old married couple, without the spark." "Exactly!" Sarah shouted a little louder than she expected. "I've been trying to figure out how to articulate that. So we both find that spark with other people, and it hasn't worked out yet." When Sarah visited in the Fall of 2014, though the two of them couldn't pick up where they left off. Too much time had passed. They met on the day before Chuseok and decided to spend the day at a museum that was open and go Seoul Tower to look at the full moon. But Allan hadn't come alone. On the day before Chuseok, Kelly tagged along before traveling to her parents' home on the East Sea the following day. What Allan thought of as a nice day with two of his favorite people was actually a day full of misunderstandings and subtext.
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