“I Have a Feeling I’m About to Lose:” At Autre Ne Veut’s Album Release Party the Night After the Election
by Dujie Tahat

Insinuate the red light through the long dark hallway into Brooklyn’s Public Record. I’m guided by the glow from outside, under the extended covered walkway, through the doors, and down the stairs, into a dimly-lit high-fidelity darkroom stage small enough that any band makes it seem crowded. The air is warm, uncanny. Atmosphere heavy. It’s the night after The Election, and I’ve been brought to a concert, an album release party for Autre Ne Veut’s latest, Love, Guess Who?? 

My wife and I stop at the doors to smoke a cigarette. Neither of us are smokers, though, for a period, I developed the habit. It’s unusual that she’s so eager for one. She’s worried about me. Earlier in the day, I had gone to the Filipino Consulate in Midtown for what should have been a straightforward passport renewal. The person I spoke to behind plexiglass took issue with my father’s Jordanian citizenship. “You’re not even Filipino,” he said flippantly, waving away my mother’s nationality and my birthplace as he walked me into an interview room, nothing more than a stool in a telephone booth facing another unkind plexiglass man. My wife holds my face and tells me I belong here, and I love her, then, more than ever.

Together, we walk in on the first opener: Kris Yute’s bright, syrupy vocals over hazy trap beats. His characteristic sound—Brooklyn-Jamaican syncopated romping—seemingly muted by the events of the day that led us here. The Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Trump in the morning. Yute manually hits play to run tracks from his cell phone, tells us between songs what prompted each, and the still-thin, mostly white crowd politely but earnestly applaud. A steady flow of people begin to trickle in when NOIA, hair gelled under oversized reflective silver clips, dressed in a gauzy white corset and lace pants, runs through her Spanglish set next. Highlighted by a short song about the white-hot fury that accompanies receiving emails, the sparkle pony singer-songwriter offers choreographed performance art along with each song, letting the audience’s imagination fill in background singers and pyrotechnics that might accompany the scale of pop star she’s performing herself into being.

After so many years away, Autre Ne Veut takes the stage. 

It’s been over a decade since the last album. Long anticipated, Love, Guess Who?? concludes a trilogy of experimental, lo-fi electronic R&B albums—the first two both critically acclaimed—that made Autre Ne Veut’s Arthur Ashin the darling of the 2010s indie scene. He starts his set with the acknowledgement, “Today’s a weird day.” Of his many gifts, Ashin has a knack for saying things plainly. Directness can be arresting. What elevates his plainspokenness, though, is his use of repetition: whole choruses made of repeating lines, using the same line to start each verse on a song, singing the same simple line over and over again. “I was on the floor with you” to start “Run Away” and then 22 more times to close the song. “I feel lost” 19 times across “About to Lose.” Some version of “You can’t save me” 10 times at the end of “Itchy Blood.” In your headphones, on the subway or folding laundry, the vocals can easily blend into the music, fall into the background, but watching Ashin sing in person, with his particular voice produced by his particular body, those repetitions become something else entirely.

To witness an Autre Ne Veut’s collapse onto the floor (which Ashin did more than once during the concert) is to feel your spirit be moved through one set of crooked teeth and into your chest. It’s a magic trick, an incantation. With each utterance, he atomizes and reconstitutes words and phrases, making a different, often surprising kind of tonal sense through pure sound. Here, tone is context, substance is form, vice versa, vice versa. It’s hard to tell if his body is casting or falling under the spell, but my witnessing, my wife, the room—we’re all recruited into the conjuring. Without language, I’m left watching a body exposing itself. A repetition of bodies exposed. Not rapture exactly but a way of knowing why we seek it. Around the 18th repetition of “I’m lying on the floor with you,” which to this point had been mostly comforting, he changes keys, becomes angry, plaintive, pleading. He’s saying the same thing, but means something different. 

There is a certainty to Ashin’s performance that draws from the inexhaustible well that is the fact of his own body. One hand holding the mic, Ashin’s free hand moves all over his face—pressing into his cheek, wrapped around his neck, cradling his head at all angles during the entirety of the concert. He rubs and beats his chest. He hugs himself. The business of his body is mirrored by the orchestrated chaos of the band on the relatively tiny stage: drummer, right corner, behind three backup singers harmonizing, belting, whispering into live loops the guitarist/cellist is capturing and orchestrating with the pedals from the floor behind the headliner. The range and control of Ashin’s voice melts all the moving pieces and even the air around him. 

Early in the set, Autre Ne Veut performs the third installment of his “World War” series—each song a direct address to a lover over the arc of a tumultuous relationship—that runs through the trilogy of albums. Another form of repetition. Love as war is my least favorite pop music trope. To abstract your beloved into a war machine has always seemed to me a failure of language and imagination. But with the third act, Ashin surprises. The “World War”s of previous albums indulged in the premise, escalated the heat of the lovers’ conflict, glossed over the countless causalities and crimes inherent to the reality of the metaphor. This time though, he seems aware of the dangers of treating words as “only things that I’m trying to say.” The lovers’ conflict in “World War, Pt. 3” is about the practical, connective material of language, how our sense of selves—to say nothing of relationships—are made and broken through language:

One more time, you say that you’re “homeless.”

These are just some words you’re trying on.

Maybe we can dream with more context,

speak with less conflict, be who we want.

In this song, he realizes words mean things and finds himself with a beloved who doesn’t know it, who doesn’t understand that one’s use of language is a responsibility to others. 585,500 Americans currently experience homelessness, living in shelters without the clarity of where they’ll sleep or what they’ll eat next. If we’re talking war, 124,000,000 people are displaced at this moment and anywhere between 5,000,000-7,000,000 people have died in the 21st century. So when Autre Ne Veut sings “So you really don’t care” he means more than just about him, beloved, the person before you, but language, too, and the way language holds a whole universe of people. So the song becomes a critique—of a previous version of himself as much as anyone else—and offers a kind of ethics of speech, a new, revelatory relationship, in this context, with language, the self, and the beloved. Here is the grace of repetition that I wasn’t expecting: a chance to fix and redress the past.

Tonight, I’m resistant. I don’t want any of it. To dance. The redress. To let go of the posture I’d committed myself to. To think again. So far from home, on the other side of the country, I had done the foolish thing of going to see a singer under the disillusionment of not wanting a song. I had been cynical about the upcoming Presidential Election for weeks, months probably. When people learn I work in politics this time of year, they always ask what I think. I’m expected to say something smart with an air of authority. But mostly they wanted a reassurance I have and could not, in good faith, offer. 

In a post-Election survey, Reuters/Ipsos found the only thing a majority of voters believe Donald Trump will actually do while President is to order the mass deportation of people in the country illegally. I flick away the headline and read a text from a political operative friend and colleague, congratulating me for having gotten my green card. Recent U.S. citizenship for him meant this was the first election he voted in. “Knowing you got your green card makes me so happy,” he wrote. “We should talk about all the trauma of being undocumented working in the movement.”

I come to my cynicism honestly. 

I got my first job in politics after graduating from college. On a Thursday, I stumbled into an Obama campaign office to volunteer. On Friday, they realized I was able-bodied and had a reliable car so was promoted to Deputy Field Organizer (a glorified volunteer). When I arrived on Monday for my shift, I’d been promoted. The field organizer who’d hired me got a DUI over the weekend, and I needed to cut turf for the week. I didn’t know what that meant, but I learned quickly that I was the only field organizer of the fifty working in Washington state talking to voters in the town I grew up in. And I was the only organizer of the five in rural Eastern Washington who grew up in the state at all. That experience articulated for me what I had long suspected about resource allocation and the structural decisions made by those with power and its impacts on people who live on the margins, particularly the majority immigrant valley I grew up in. Those most impacted never get to make the decisions.

I’ve told this story so much—in job interviews, to introduce myself to potential clients and close deals. For most of the time I told it, I was an out-of-status immigrant. I conclude by saying that, without the right to vote, the next best I could do was to devote my career to telling people how to vote. It’s why I started a political consulting firm in the first place. Civic engagement is more than voting. Like all good rhetorical movements, the story is a fable, an allegory about faith. My duty. My job. My country. 

Repeated often enough even shibboleths fall apart.

At the party, Autre Ne Veut begins with the last song on the album, “About to Lose,” in which each verse begins with the line “I’ve got this feeling I’m about to lose.” We’re in Brooklyn the day the Election was called, so it’s fair to assume we’d all lost something that day. Maybe it’s even a kind of joke. Nevertheless he starts the evening with this incantation about losing, this repetition. I think the mind that animates the whole project—particularly his use of repetition—lives in that line in the moment of silence between “feeling” and “I.” That moment gathers many meanings:

“I’ve got this feeling. I’m about to lose.” As in: I’m pessimistic about the likely outcome. For us, for sure, but for myself in particular. In the grand play of our lives, a major act has ended, and with each curtain fall, we hurtle towards a tragic end. I can see that I have been defeated, over and over again, on this and every astral plane, our endeavor, this love, the discourse that becomes the story of who we are.

OR 

I’ve got this feeling I’m about to lose like the way our grade-school loves leave us, suddenly and without warning. Whatever belief about you and I that moved me to this point has now left me, and we are bereft, unmoored, sailing our separate ways on the waves of chance.

OR 

Get gone. 

OR

When even my wife would ask if I thought we’d win the Election, I’d say I don’t know about the “we” here, letting the satisfaction of my own cleverness protect me from the rage and heartache roiling just below the surface.

OR 

When we imagine burying our beloveds, we want to believe there is nothing after.

OR

313 electoral college votes. 

OR 

I’m afraid. I’m scared. And I’m alone.

OR 

“I’m about to lose,” of this I’m certain. I’ve been told this over and over again. If I felt differently, I wouldn’t lose so much. And if I didn’t feel at all, I wouldn’t have anything at all to lose.

ET CETERA, ET CETERA

Love, Guess Who?? ends with a soaring call and response. The singer lamenting, “I feel lost,“ crashing into background vocals, “I don’t want to feel better without you,” more specifically, the voice doubles down, “I don’t want to feel better.” During the concert, this is the band’s peak, their fever pitch. Autre Ne Veut and back up singers delirious, almost screaming at each other, together, at us. Let’s call all this back and forth a discourse between lovers. Or the inner dialogue between competing parts of you. Or the rhetoric between a nation and a citizen by some other name. Or the negotiation between a body and a group of anonymous bodies swaying in rhythm in a dark basement somewhere in Brooklyn while a singer kneels, weeping on the ground. “I feel lost” sounds so much like “I feel loved.” It’s pathetic. The admission of having been without balanced against the need to be loved. The yearning. The wretched mortality of it all. We’re dancing and the song is miserable and the singer is sad and the world is ending and another world, somewhere, is beginning.

I danced the night after the Election. And I didn’t even want to. 

That night, on this new album about heartbreak, Autre Ne Veut tells us about ourselves. He doesn’t merely adorn the aesthetics of grief, but enacts it, and, in so doing, the concert becomes a site of grief, an erected permission structure to be within our own individual griefs. I don’t want to dance, but my wife reaches for me. I don’t want to dance, but the lights are fading. I don’t want to dance, but my country has told me, yet again, in another grand, sweeping way, of its cruel hatred for me and my people. It must all move through me, one way or another. Autre Ne Veut makes himself pathetic, and I am compelled to move. 

Autre Ne Veut makes himself pathetic and transforms a crowd of strangers into people moving together. And of course, I am not under the impression that everyone I have ever danced with in the dark are my people. But, in many a dark room, including the one I was in the night after the Election, dancing, having lost again, whatever losing might mean when the meaning of losing moves around as easily as goalposts, I have imagined myself of a people I would otherwise have been outside of. That night, Autre Ne Veut gave something of himself—album, voice, body—for friends and strangers to witness. He stripped language of its provincial use, turned it into song cast out in the shape of grief that many other bodies could pour themselves into. I was not alone, and it took seeing someone make themselves pathetic to recognize the fact of my not-aloneness. Whatever form of solidarity a new regime demands of those outside of it, this must be a start. 

Dujie Tahat is a poet and critic living and working in Washington state. They are the author of three poetry chapbooks: Here I Am O My God, selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship; Salat, winner of the Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award and longlisted for the 2020 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection; and Balikbayan, finalist for The New Michigan Press / DIAGRAM chapbook contest and the Center for Book Arts honoree. Along with Luther Hughes and Gabrielle Bates, they cohost The Poet Salon podcast.

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