Tough Customer // Wire

New Villager

How dumb is Chris Brown? He fucked up sooooo bad. It’s like he not only killed the golden goose, but he also roasted it over a pile of burning baby seals and then ate it with his bare hands in front of the entire California chapter of PETA.

Seriously, until very recently his life could not have been any better. If you had stopped any random dude on the street two weeks ago and granted him a wish, he would have basically asked to be Chris Brown. “Well, it would be great to be young again. But wait, I would really like to have a fancy sports car. Although, I’d also like to have a hot R&B singer for a girlfriend. Maybe I could just be a celebrity myself…?”

Chris Brown has (had) all those things. He is 19 years old. He was dating Rihanna and he was on his way to perform at the Grammys in a brand new Lamborghini. What?! That’s like god decided to make sweet love to your life. You literally and tangibly had it better than 99.9% of the other humans on this planet. Why not just sit back and let amazing things happen to you?

Instead, Chris Brown decided to beat up a girl. There is no possible way he can justify that. I mean, what could he possibly say? She insulted him? She insulted his mother? She insulted him and his mother and his grandmother? So what? You’re Chris Brown. You’re in a $250,000 sports car with one of the most beautiful girls in the world. It should be pretty easy to keep insults like that in perspective. If I was in Chris Brown’s position I don’t think I would ever get mad. Rihanna could pee in my shoes and I’d be like, “That’s cool. I’m just gonna drive my Lamborghini over to Beverly Hills and buy a thousand new pairs of shoes. And then I’m going to have sex with, like, ten groupies at once. And then me and Justin Timberlake are gonna go catch a Laker’s game. Peace out.”

I guess it’s just a classic case of too much is never enough. This malady seems to strike a disproportionate number of celebrities - most likely because they are among the select group of people who almost always have too much. For you or me, just having the fancy car or the fancy girl or the fancy friends would probably be enough to make us feel pretty good. I’m sure plenty of people get a vicarious thrill just from imagining that they have those things. But for people like Chris Brown it probably takes more than a fast car and a hot girl to get his pulse pounding.

Unfortunately this seems to be a sad, but true fact of the human condition. The more we have, the more we want. This makes the pursuit of happiness an essentially futile task, since it will always be just out of reach. Which is a depressing thought, since I’m told that the pursuit of happiness is basically the whole point of life. Still, that’s no reason to go beating up your girlfriend. Why don’t you channel some of that anger into your art? You know, write a song about it or something.

That’s what New Villager did. The duo, which is equal parts California and New York, has composed a pensive little dance nugget called “Rich Doors.” This should have been the song they played during the meta-futuristic rave scene in The Matrix 2. The drums have a tribal pulse and the sparse lyrics have the quality of a poem spoken in the back of a long, dark cave. They seem to tell the story of someone who has it all and yet still searches for more, if only because there isn’t anything else for them to do.

If nothing else, it’s a beautiful song that is definitely celebrating something bittersweet. It could be celebrity excess or the meaningless pursuit of happiness in this lifetime. Their website leads me to believe it might also have something to do with The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but I don’t really know what that is. So instead I will just assume it is a searing indictment of Chris Brown and domestic abuse. Listen to your fellow artists Chris. Stop the violence.

MP3: ‘Rich Doors’