'Salt Coast' by Kae Tempest; A Close Reading
Kae Tempest’s 2022 song ‘Salt Coast’ captures a significant personal and cultural moment within the framework of human/nature interconnections. In a refreshingly candid but intimate dedication to their homeland of England, Tempest illuminates the multiple abstract and concrete tensions co-existing within the land they bear a deep attachment to. Culminating at the intersection of music, poetry, fiction and performance, ‘Salt Coast’ assumes a new form to embody the current moment of contemporary literature. Tempest also engages with concepts that are indicative of the complex, and exhausting current cultural context through a dissection of the paradoxes and crevices of climate change. Thus, Tempest inadvertently proposes, that in the wake of posthumanism, where ‘nature is no longer ‘natural’, (and) the reliable ‘dense’ background of our lives now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic manner,’ new forms of language and literature must emerge to create any capacity for documenting, describing, or resisting the world in which they are responding to. (Clark, 2011) Ergo, music becomes literature. Tempest writes from the liminal space of the cleavage between the dichotomies that consume contemporary eco-literary anxieties; past and present, pop-culture and the canon, the page and the stage, human and nature.
However, Tempest invites their audience into these liminal spaces to illustrate that they are fertile grounds that produce intersections, bridges between, and channels within and throughout superficial dichotomies. Tempest provides an undercurrent of this ambiguous space throughout the entire text, as they create subject-position and narration with opacity and deliberate obscurity. As Britain takes shape as the island surrounded by ‘salt coasts’ and synonymous with ‘leaves, rain,’ the island is positioned in intimate and knowing proximity with Tempest, as it becomes the ‘You’ that they consistently address. As their homeland is promoted from a mere nation state to the personal and familiar, it is described with poignance and devotion. The text employs the use of anaphora to further this intimacy within lines 11 and 12; “I love the way you crumble into chalk at your edges / I love the way you fade into a sky that is as endless.” In such techniques Tempest describes the contours of England’s land like the contours of a lover’s body; with deep knowingness, distinct observations and an endearing warmth. However, a contradictory melancholy also consumes such lines where the language references slow but evident decay; coastlines ‘crumbling,’ and ‘fading.’ This foreshadows the explicit struggles of the British land in the stanzas to come, with “the tension woven so tight it defies its dimension,” and where ‘leaves, rain’ becomes, “The browning of your leaves / And the greening of your rain.”
Subsequently, Tempest’s tensions of home and identity, and England’s tensions between human and nature culminate in the text’s use of metric variation, allowing “Home” to occupy the whole of line 60. Through affording such significance and weight to the single word choice of ‘home’ within its own line, Tempest illustrates that despite the varying contexts and significations that are projected onto this particularly charged word, ‘home’ is a concept so tethered to various faculties of our world, with relationships so complex, it must consume a whole line.
In framing ‘Salt Coast’ through the theory of ‘solastagia,’ the charged contemporary language of ‘home’ that Tempest captures, can become more productively understood. The philosopher, Glenn Albrecht, establishes this “psychoterratic” condition he calls solastalgia, which he and his research team have observed it in multiple cultures. Solastalgia is a type of mental pain that arises when home is irreparably changed by the subtle indexations of the climate. Things that should bloom don’t. Small rituals are relocated.
“So beautiful, so chaotic, so grounded
Home
Concrete and loam
Brick-dust and loans
Wood-floors
Screen-doors
And a place of your own”
Albrecht establishes that other than ‘nostalgia,’ there are few words in English that closely connect psychological and environmental states. Emerging from ‘desolation’ and ‘solace,’ Albrecht adopts an element of both through ‘solast’ and merges it with ‘algia,’ a suffix meaning ‘pain.’ Using Albrecht’s apt language affords us the ability to understand that a significant part of Tempest’s paradoxical feelings towards their homeland of England, can be read as a new type of eco-emotion that has emerged in congruency with the worsening of climate change. (Albrecht, 2006)
This eco-emotion is unsurprising when taking into consideration Timothy Morton’s proposition that ecological thinking creates a radical coexistence, a vast sprawling mesh without a definite centre or edge. It is the ‘thinking of interconnectedness.’ (Morton, Introduction: Critical Thinking) This interconnectedness inevitably creates active tethers between the spaces of human minds, the environments they find comfort in, and the liminal emotions that emerge amongst them.
Tempest addresses their home;
“Keep going and it will get better
I love the way you push to get clear
I love the way you dance to get strong”
These enunciations of solastalgia illuminate a deep devotion between Tempest and their place of home, as its ‘Slick clay, rock-formed, wet sand, moss borne,’ remains static between ‘What came before / And what will come after.’
However, I extend this theory of solastalgia, which is grounded within the form of human psychology, and extend it to recentralise the environment as the foreground of experience and narration. Capitalising on Tempest’s ambiguous subject-position and unreliable narrator, I propose that it is not Tempest’s ‘psychoterratic’ condition that is being investigated within this text at all, but the ‘crumbling edges,’ ‘slick clay,’ and ‘wet sand’ of the environment that is indeed consumed by the pain.
As ‘Salt Coast’ ‘ebbs and flows’ with varying line length, and Tempest’s performance emphasises vocality and cadence, as well as change in rhythm, experiencing the text evokes the same “sleeve-pulling nervousness” and piercing uncomfortability of the ‘chorus’ of “Old ghosts” against “scrap tin,” that the land is currently ruminating in. These metonymic references are indexes of the contemporary industries, institutions and ideologies that are environmentally colliding within the site of the land.
Bibliography
Albrecht, G. (2006). Solastalgia. Alternativies Journal, 32(4/5), 34-36. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/45033546
Clark, T. (2011). Post-humanism and the 'end of nature'? In T. Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Enviornment (pp. 63-72). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:doi:10.1017/CBO9780511976261.009
Morton, T. (2010). Introduction: Critical Thinking. In T. Morton, The Ecological Thought (pp. 1-19). Harvard University Press. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=3300977