Several Perspectives in one song: ‘2Faces’ van Phora
Lyrics tell a story. And those lyrics, most of the times, is usually based on just one perspective. Or, when multiple artist sing together, of two contrasting perspectives. For example, like those of a man and a woman in a love song. And yet, there are more interesting approaches to be found through the entirety of our musical history, in which a less common approach was taken on. One of these, is the song and accompanying videoclip ´2Faces´ of Phora (2016), as the lyrics don’t necessarily contain a clear chronotope.[1] The actions that are carried out are described by the characters. Phora, the auteur and narrator, is giving a speech in first-person direct discourse and thought[2] of homodiegetic internal focalization[3] about someone else; ‘you’. There are a few micro-narratives to be found within his monologue that are mainly implemented after the hook: ‘and yesterday I heard a friend of mine talking about you’ (see appendix). These are the moments that the narrators perspective moves towards the third-person, as he tells about the actions of other persona. The remaining actions are mainly transferred through describing the completed actions. He regularly switches to the second-person, but Phora knows how to end his sentences in the shape of a question of a first-person; the perspective that is the dominance of this song. By the use of the second-person the first question is the same questions as Abbots’ Abbotts The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative in chapter 6 page 71, that comes to mind: who or what is ‘you’? Or; where does the story go about?[4]
When the rap is started, you’ll make the assumption that ‘you’ is a person, since a personal pronoun brings the convention of pointing out living beings. This assumption seems to be true partly because of the following sentences. ‘Know I spend so much time with you, but I never met you’ is contrasting to the following: ‘I hate being around you’, as that implies that they were present in the same room. That leaves us to the conclusion that we do not have to interpret the first sentence literally. He did meet ‘you’, but didn’t actually meet the real nature of ‘you’. This could also be a reference to the reader, as it isn’t specified for us who ‘you’ is.
Besides; there is being talked about ‘you’ as if it is a property: ‘They wish they had you, see the look in their eyes? They jealous of me, I have you, now they want me to die’. My intentional reading[5] about this is that ‘you’, is a woman, due to the notion of reducing woman and talking about them as property. Besides, the statement ‘I refuse to spend all my time in this world trying to chase you’ leaves me to think it is about a woman, as the biological roles are often described as man being the hunters and woman as gatherers or caretakers. ‘I can still taste you. I can still feel you to the touch. Well, I guess I spend too much time on you’ confirms these suspicions from ‘I’ against ‘you’ as man versus woman. I do consider this as a form of overreading,[6] since the spectator, as a remedy to its own discomfort, wants to interpret ‘you’.[7]
Naturally, the lyrics also contain agon.[8] These are immediately introduced in the hook of the song, namely ‘I hate being around you’ and ‘I can’t live without you’. His problem is that he doesn’t know a way to cope with ‘you’, while he attaches worth to it and feels lonely regardless of having ‘you’. This could point towards the motives of the song being love, hate and loneliness. This love-hate relationship is a melodramatic masterplot, as these motives are diametrically opposed to each other. However, in reality the masterplot is postmodern, as these aspects are both to be found in the form of a antagonist and protagonist for Phora in ‘you’.[9]
I start to doubt the assumption of ‘you’ as being a female in verse 2 due to the following bars:
But shit, I'm taking care of my mama
Making sure that she's happy
Got her a brand new mattress and put food in the pantry
Show these people that I'm everything that they said I can't be
So if they hate me for needing you, they don't understand me
The connection between ‘you’ that, according to the lyrics, changed ‘I’ and the taking care of his mom by means of buying life’s necessaries, in which he needs the ‘you’, seems negative. The situation that the describes, seems to be in the form of abuse. The motive behind the lyrics, which I assumed to be love, adopts a totally different meaning. It changed to a form of love to what someone can mean for you instead of loving the person self. Again, these presumptions are confirmed later on: ‘Even through hard times, you was always there when the rent due’. The love doesn’t seem to be based on his personality traits, but on materialistic means. Subsequently, a stereotypical image of surrounding yourself in richness and the attention that comes with it is drawn. You’ll see a shift from verse one, that’s mainly about possession, loyalty and loneliness, to verse 2, that’s focussing more on success, materiality and aversion.[10]
‘How can you have a heart? You don't have a heart, you don't have feelings for shit.’
When we interpret this in the literal sense, it seems to be that ‘you’ was never a person. This could explain the shift of topics between the verses.
You got two sides, you got two faces
Now you wondering who's this person and all these places
But this person's not human, this person can't feel
It's the almighty dollar that we all been chasing
Two faces
From the final four bars it turns out that ‘you’ is an object indeed, namely money. The ‘two faces’ literally refer to the two sides of a bill, while the thematic of the song is revealed; money doesn’t create happiness. With this the lyrics provide for the crux of the story and a closure towards who the ‘you’ in the song actually is. Remarkably, due to applying intentional reading, while focussing on finding out who ‘you’ is, you’ll forget to read symptomatically which causes you to rule out any object in advance.[11]
With the help of the videoclip I want to see if the confusion surrounding ‘you’ was done intentionally by the author or a form of over- or underreading.[12] The videoclip is an adaption of the mediums lyrics, which causes the combination of videoclip, music and lyrics to be a narrative hypertext.[13] The videoclip is producer by Anthro Beats X Eskupe Uno and directed by George Orozco.
The videoclip starts with some shots of a man and woman who sit together in a car and hold hands. Remarkable, is that, combined with the image of Phore still being the narrator from the first-person in direct style, the focalization is split up between the narrators voice, Phora, and through the eyes of the actor of the videoclip that lives through the story. Because of that, Phora seems to narrate from an intradiegetic perspective. This division is also captured through the images by portraying Phora, combined with neonlights in claire-obscure, on the backseat of the car. He literally looks at the story coming to life at the front seats of the car.[14]
The images clearly respond to the assumption that ‘you’ is a woman. After ‘You got two faces to you’ (0:22-0:24)[15] you’ll see a shot of the main character that looks at the female co-driver with a change of shots (0:25) towards the same female co-rider at the word ‘you’. On 0:5616 you’ll see a female walking away from a group of man on a parking lot. She is being checked, while the lines ‘I see the way they look at you, trying to get your attention’ accompany the passage. Finally, in verse 1 after “All the times I kept you safe, you should be telling me "Thank you"’ (1:17), whereby the ‘I’ saves the female character from another man. you’ll notice that the director played with audiovisual interpretation in the same way during verse 2.
Notably, on 1:32 you’ll hear the text ‘I won’t die for you’, which doesn’t necessarily stand out without the accompaniment of images. In relation to the videoclip, this is text marked as situational irony though, as from 3:26 on a turnaround is shown in the story. During the line ‘But this person's not human’ the main character is shot dead, after which, on op ‘this person can't feel. It's the almighty dollar (that we’ve been chasing)’, money is stolen from the car by a friend from the story, who he described as untrustworthy. After which the last shots are shown of Phora on the backseat of the car, while the screen zoomes out and the man and female are laying dead on the front seats of the car.
The audiovisual combination makes the interpretation of the words ‘2faces’ a lot more diverse that the text would imply at first. First of all, the end could refer to Phora telling us that these persons, are actually characters and that their deads are actually a metaphor for the distance the rapper took towards the money. Backed by the reason that money has ‘2faces’. Secondly, it could refer to the meaning of ‘2faces’ portraying the friend in sthe story betraying him and thus showing his other, true face. In which ‘2faces’ sounds as ‘true faces’. Third, the dead could be a metaphor for the relationship between the man and female, who blead to dead in the story when the money is gone. The female could have had two faces, where she only dated the male for the money. With this a stereotype of golddiggers is portrayed on the screen.[16]
The final interpretation involves the ten seconds before as well. From 3:19[17] on, you’ll see multiple shots of advertisements about alcohol. This could link ‘you got two sides, you got two faces’ to the results of drinking alcohol. When you possess richness it becomes a lot easier to reach to addictive substances and to abuse those. The interpretation could come down to spending all of their money, which leads to them dying due to an overdose. The colors and bright lights are also aligned with the atmosphere of the shots in which Phora is rapping. When you connect these interpretations of atmospheres, you might be able to say that Phora was rapping about an alcoholic addiction all this time. The question then arises if this solely my interpretation or if this imaginary was consciously made by Phora.
Eventually, the images and text tell the same story. They just focus on multiple different aspects. The images merely focus on micro-narratives that are presented by Phora. Because of this, you’ll get to know the underlying thoughts and reasons of the killers on the end and the misery that surrounds this topic. The lyrics, on the other hand, focus more on the ambiguity of the words of which the meaning is reinforced by the image. My interpretation comes from the combination of the text and images. Phora tries to mislead us in our interpretation by putting a female in the images, just like the attraction of richness also misleads us. However, the story tries to tell us that money doesn’t bring us happiness, as wealth contains a lot of pitfalls and the story will always turn out different than you’ll expect at the beginning. So you’ll turn out to have a rude awakening.
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[1] H. Porter Abbot, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2e ed. Cambridge Introductions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 230.
[2] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 231/233.
[3] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 233/235.
[4] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 13-39/67-82/160-174.
[5] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 235.
[6] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 239.
[7] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 83-111.
[8] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 228.
[9] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 40-66.
[10] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 83-98.
[11] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 55-66/83-111.
[12] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 239.
[13] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 235.
[14] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 67-82.
[15] ‘Phora – 2Faces [Official Music Video]’, Youtube video, 4:03, geplaatst door ‘Phora YoursTruly’, 7 augustus, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeYGxIW4OK4.
[16] Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 100-111/130-144.
[17] ‘Phora – 2Faces [Official Music Video]’, Youtube video, 4:03, geplaatst door ‘Phora YoursTruly’, 7 augustus, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeYGxIW4OK4.
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Used Literature
Abbot, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. 2e ed. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
‘Phora – 2Faces [Official Music Video]’. Youtube video, 4:03. Geplaatst door ‘Phora YoursTruly’. 7 augustus, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeYGxIW4OK4.