An In Depth Textual Analysis of Cajmere's "Percolator" | US | Translation

Earlier this week our good friends at Noisey ran this very extensive look at the philosophical questions raised by the Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face". Not to be out done, we here at THUMP want to flex our intellectual muscles and show the world that dance music isn't just big dumb fun. We went to university too, you know!

Today I want to look at one song in depth and work out exactly how it works structurally and what it means. Obviously the meaning of "meaning" is incredibly difficult —nay impossible— to define, but we'll try and muddle through the darkness of interpretation and understanding. Let's walk through the labyrinth together, my friends.

The song I want to look at is Cajmere's seminal "Percolator". "Percolator" is one of those records that seems almost elemental. It's basically just a flat 4/4, the sound of some bubbles popping, the occasional fire alarm sinewave and some incredible, incredible lyrics. But. readers, it's so much more than that. "Percolator" is a distillation of everything that's incredible about house music: it is dumb and fun and bold and brash and it positively drips with pleasure. It's a sweat-soaked ode to the joys of clubbing, of going out. But that's not what we're here to talk about. We're here to talk about words.

Now, clubs are great, but libraries and classrooms are even better —you're less likely to get stuck talking to some foaming-mouthed, burnt out old codger who still bangs eccies like Bez in his prime because his life is so devoid of any meaning, so utterly lacking in anything of substance that he's got to devote every spare minute to trying to tell uninterested 21 year olds about the good old days in a seminar room. Possibly. So given that, let's split up into small groups and spend a few minutes having a look at the lyrics below.

That was fun wasn't it? What illuminating conversations we all had just then. No, you didn't do the reading either, yes, last night was quite messy, no I haven't started the essay yet either. Anyway, let's all feedback to the room. Let's give "Percolator" the kind of textual analysis a text as important as this is deserving of.

Fortunately the message that "Percolator" literally delivers is incredibly brief. "It's time for the percolator". That's it. That's the entire text. People often cite, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn," as the most powerful example of the power of micro-fiction, thinking that the story, often attributed to every bludgeoning bore's favourite author Ernest Hemingway, has the kind of depth that most 400 page efforts could only dream of. Firstly, that's bullshit — it's trite, reductive, cloying, and sentimental. Secondly, what that literary hardman did in six words, Cajmere —aka Green Velvet aka Curtis Jones— does in five. Suck on that, Ernest. For whom the bell tolls indeed.

Let's firstly think about what the statement means in its totality and then consider how each individual component works within said totality, and on it's own. "It's time for the percolator" could, really, mean anything, because as we all know by now, language is nothing more than an intangible concept that exists in a permanent state of total fluidity wherein it means both nothing and everything at once. Words are nothing more than vocal exhortations of signs and signifiers, while, really, actually, genuinely, being all we have in this world. The world is language; language is the world. Nothing exists until we will it into being through language, right? Right. Dogs weren't dogs until we called them dogs. Shame didn't exist until someone, back before the world became the world we know now, named it so. "It's time for the percolator" is as valid a statement as "there is no God," and as inherently nonsensical as saying "there is a God." Language exists in a state of flux, but man invented culture to turn the momentary —the spoken word— into the permanent — the written word. What then, happens when the spoken word is immortalized and memorialized as a recording, as something that could, conceivably, exist forever? What happens when it's time for the percolator?

The song offers us no real clues and that's what makes it such an interesting proposition. The repetition of the phrase as a whole means it takes on the form of the mantra, an infinitely extended, unceasing refrain that causes us to meditate on the nature of language itself and the way communication is, when you think about it, an incredibly alien thing. If we accept that words are nothing but lexical placeholders for both the real and the unreal, then we can also accept that "it's time for the percolator" means both everything and nothing at once. And that's what makes it beautiful. That repetition in full lends it an almost cosmic importance: if we tell someone something often enough they'll start to believe it, start to assume that whatever's being said goes beyond merely being said. Fuck yeah, it really is time for the percolator. And we're ready for it.

We're also ready to unpack it, briefly, bit by bit.

"It's" is a key word in the phrase, indicating as it does a sense of being. "It" is proof of existence, is it not? That which isn't can't ever be an "it" because for something to be an "it" is to, in a way, confirm that it deserves to have the status of the "It". So there's that to start with.

We've established the importance of the "it" but the word that follows it is even more important. "Time". Think about time. Christ, it's enough to make your head hurt. "Time" and time itself is a fantastic way of thinking about the complexity of our relationship to language. Time, as we know, is another construct. One that's only secondary to language in completely, utterly affecting our entire experience of the the world. A timeless world is a black hole. A world where we can't think of past, present, and future, is a world that's terrifyingly alien. And then, you remember that, time, like everything else, from bikes to borrowing, seashells to sorrow, is an inherently linguistically modelled and mapped thing. Pass me the joint, mate!

Next we come to "for" — not much to say about this one. Sorry, readers. "For" is just a word.

Same with "the" even though some people might argue that "the" is even more important than "it" in terms of defining existence, but fuck those people.

Finally, we've got the thorny issue of the "percolator". Deciphering the "percolator" is pivotal to understanding the phrase, "it's time for the percolator". By now, though, my head hurts and language has stopped meaning anything so I'll let you work it out.

In short: good song but the lyrics are a bit shit.

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