FKA twigs, Papi Pacify

“Papi Pacify” is a song from FKA twigs’ EP2, which was released in 2013. The song is produced by Arca (who has also recently worked with Kanye West, Björk, and Kelela). The music video for “Papi Pacify” is co-directed by FKA twigs and Tom Beard (who has worked with twigs a number of other times, as well as directing videos for Florence and the Machine and other indie British bands). The song might be described as a ghostly hybrid of trip hop and r&b. The synthesized music features a lot of rumbling sound in the bass register, together with violent and irregular percussive banging. But “Papi Pacify” is also rather slow in tempo; this makes it feel close to ambient music — with its suspended, floating quality — despite the insistent punctuation of the percussion. Like a lot of recent EDM (electronic dance music), the song is devoid of tonal shifts; but it moves between different gradations of intensity, building to a climax through changes in timbre and a thickening of the sound.

In “Papi Pacify,” as in most of her music, FKA twigs’ voice is heavily processed, so that it resonates like yet another electronic instrument. She sings in a high register, contrasting with the instrumental sound. Her voice is also drawn out and amplified, with considerable reverb. There’s a breathless, floating intensity to twigs’ singing, which moves beyond actual words into drawn-out cries of “mmm” and “ahhh.” I cannot avoid hearing this voice as if it were speaking in a near-whisper — even though it stands out, quite loud, at the forefront of the mix.

The emotional tone of the song fluctuates between plaintiveness and outright pleading. The lyrics are deeply ambivalent: twigs begs her lover to “pacify our love,” and “clarify our love,” by assuring her of his faithfulness even if he does not mean it. Empty, lying reassurances are better than none at all. The song is thus about deception and dependency. The singer wills herself to continue trusting her lover, even though she knows that he has already betrayed her. In this way, twigs simultaneously disavows and fuels her own erotic-romantic disquiet.

I cannot really imagine dancing to a song like “Papi Pacify,” despite its formal similarities to EDM. For twigs’ and Arca’s music is just too rhythmically irregular and disruptive — not to mention too slow and depressive — to be easily danceable. The off-rhythms convey imbalance and tension, even as the song’s overall tempo, and its harmonic stasis, create a sense of paralysis.

However, dance is central to FKA twigs’ art, and especially to her music videos. “Papi Pacify” is not literally dance-based, in the way that many of twigs’ other videos are. But the play of the figures on the screen — the movement of their bodies, and even of their hands — is highly rhythmic, suggesting a sort of dance. Even if the gestures and postures in this video are not actually arranged by a choreographer, they still seem to be “choreographed” via cinematography and editing.

The music video for “Papi Pacify” is shot in black and white. It is composed entirely of images of the faces and upper bodies of FKA twigs and her male partner. (I haven’t been able to find any credits identifying this performer). The only bright lighting in the video shines directly on twigs’ face, and on her elaborately sculpted nails. Though the male partner is never illuminated as brightly as twigs is, we do get to clearly see his face and torso. His sexy, muscular, and athletic bulk stands out against twigs’ thin and flexible body. The crisp, gorgeously high-contrast black-and-white cinematography brings out the flesh tones of the two performers. Both twigs and her partner are black; but she is relatively light-skinned, while he is much darker. The video’s up-front beautification of black bodies stands in deliberate opposition to the traditional cinema’s almost exclusive obsession with pale white skin (and its concomitant myths of white female “purity”).

Like many music videos, “Papi Pacify” alternates between two separate series of images. The first series shows twigs engaged erotically with her partner. The second series, in contrast, shows twigs by herself; she wears an ornate necklace and her body is covered with glitter. The first series is confined to medium shots that show us the performers’ faces and upper bodies. But the second series varies from extreme closeups of twigs’ eyes to shots that show us her entire face and torso.

However, these two series of images do not correspond, as they often do in music videos, to two separate locations. This is because the video as a whole offers us no sense of location. In both series of images, the human figures emerge from a murky, undifferentiated background. The darkness behind them is too vague and undefined to seem like any sort of actual place. In other words, the video has no settings, whether real or simulated. The action of the human figures can only be situated within, or upon, the electronic screen itself.

This means that the video is effectively non-diegetic. We respond to the bodies we see, as to the music we hear; but we cannot take what we see and hear as a represented action (or series of actions) in a delimited space. We are rather presented, I would like to say, with a mode of digital and electronic presence that cannot be translated or resolved into analog, representational terms. The bodies of twigs and her partner are not absented in favor of their signifying images, as would be the case in a movie (at least according to traditional film theory). Rather, these bodies impinge upon the screen, and thereby present themselves directly to us, precisely as forces and pulsations.

The video is intensely erotic, even though it doesn’t show us twigs’ breasts, or the genitalia of either actor. For much of the video, the man either has his hands around twigs’ throat, or else sticks his fingers deep into her mouth and down her throat. At times, twigs almost seems to be on the point of choking. In the YouTube comments to the video, there are fierce arguments as to whether this is a representation of abuse, or whether it is rather a positive depiction of consensual BDSM. But as my students pointed out when we discussed it in class, what the video actually shows us is fairly mild, in terms of the actual practices of consensual BDSM.

If the video feels so visceral and intense, this is not just because of the actions that it literally depicts, but also because of the extreme intimacy that it expresses. In every shot, twigs is close to the camera. In the shots that include the male partner, he is always positioned just slightly above and behind her. There is almost no physical distance between the two of them; he is always holding her. They also stare into each other’s eyes, and seem closely attentive to each other’s sightest movements and gestures.

But twigs does not just exchange glances with her partner. At other times, though he continues to look at her, she closes her eyes in apparent sexual abandon. And even more frequently, she stares directly at the camera. This means that there is also no sense of distance between twigs and the viewer. She seems to be imploring us, or even perhaps exchanging glances with us: in any case, she include us within the video’s flows, its acts of bodily exchange.

Some YouTube commentators say that twigs looks desperate and begging for rescue, and that this is why she stares into the camera. But I myself am unable to see it this way. For me as for many other commentators, twigs’ gaze and facial expressions rather imply trust and acceptance. Indeed, they sometimes come close to ecstasy.

The video is all about intimacy and proximity: between twigs and her partner, and also between twigs and us. There isn’t enough distance between twigs and the viewer to allow for the objectifying effect of the usual cinematic gaze. Video bodies operate according to a different — and more immediate — logic than film bodies do. We are just too close to the lovers to be able to respond voyeuristically to what they do.

Extreme intimacy can of course be suffocating, as much as it can be ecstatic and fulfilling. The video, like the song itself, expresses both of these at once, in a sort of oxymoronic tension. The music and the images lack any forward movement towards a conclusion; there is rather an intensification that at the same time stands in place. At the same time, the sounds and images alike are too tense and off-kilter to suggest any sort of equilibrium or stasis.

The video’s presentation of physical contact to the point of suffocation may well go along with what I have called the breathlessness of twigs’ singing. It is worth noting, however, that the video mostly avoids lip syncing. There are some moments when twigs mouths the words — or nonverbal cries — of the song, but more often she does not. Most music videos (except for the ones that directly document or mimic live performance) tend, in varying degrees, to self-consciously call attention to their use of lip-syncing. “Papi Pacify” pushes quite strongly in this direction. The occasional moments of synchronization fix our attention on twigs’ face and figure. But because she only lip syncs occasionally, we are spared both the pretense that she is actually performing the song, and the opposite pretense that the action of the video is somehow “really” happening independently of the song. This is yet another reason why I consider the video to be non-diegetic and non-representational.

All these tendencies are further amplified by the complex editing of the video. Instead of progressive action, we are given what might be called a series of jump cuts, presenting the same scenes over and over again from a variety of slightly different angles. The camera sometimes modifies its position very slightly, but otherwise it never moves. A lot of the action — the touching and embracing — seems to take place in slow motion. A few times there is extremely rapid cutting and flashing, which gives an oddly disjointed rhythmic effect in contrast to the overall slowness of the song.

Most strikingly, many of the shots in the video are run in loops, forwards and backwards a number of times, sort of like an animated GIF. This seems to happen especially when the partner is pushing his fingers into twigs’ mouth and down her throat. This looping repetition results both in a sense of dreamlike slowness, and in the impression that these actions are not just done once and for all, but rather are repeated over and over. The effect is something like that evoked by the use of the imperfect tense in many languages (though, unfortunately, this form does not really exist in English).

“Papi Pacify” leaves us floating in a strange erotic time, which is not the time of everyday life, but also not the “time in its pure state” of Bergsonian duration. It is rather an uneven, pulsed time, which ebbs and flows in irregular waves. It’s a highly sexualized time. But it is also quite emphatically not the time that leads teleologically to the culmination of male orgasm. We are in a realm of different sexual practices here: one that we might well call “feminine” — but perhaps not, since it is too irregular, too uncertain, and also too intimate, to fit easily on either side of the conventional male/female binary. I would like to say, also, that this is a kind of digital and electronic time: one that is not intrinsic to our new technologies in any essentialistic sense, but that could not have been accessed without them.