Disregarding the issue of my writing style in general, am I a terrible blogger? Most assuredly. Updating will never be one of my strong points, and when anything from a terrible heatwave to a pressing deadline looms, goodbye blogging. But the weather is cooler now so here I am with a song from one of my favorite bands, the relatively unknown 90s band from Seattle called The Posies. Lyrical brilliance, amazing melodies and harmonies to go along with those lyrics, and an excellent fusion of sweet pop and post-punk make them a real joy to listen to. This song, "Please Return It," showcases all of the above.
I think the key to understanding this song is to grasp the situation as it is laid out at the beginning of the song when Stringfellow (although Auer joins in throughout the song) sings: "Like a letter, / I just sent it, / please return it, / just forget it." If you have ever been in the grip of a really strong emotion and been compelled to put it into writing (a love letter or a really angry letter come to mind as the paradigmatic instances) and then sent that letter to its intended recipient, and then regretted sending it, I think you can understand the feeling behind this song. In particular there's that time of absolute helplessness after that letter has been sent but before it's been read that this song is about: the feeling of having totally exposed yourself to another and being unable to cover that up again.
Although this feeling is perhaps best captured by that experience with the letter, it corresponds to a much broader range of things than just that, which is why they (and, as I've mentioned, it tends to be a they--the harmony is especially significant here, although I'd have to do more work tracking it to make something more out of it) sing: "When we live the life we live, / it's never ours completely, / not completely." A certain amount of one-sided vulnerability is inevitable in most if not all human interactions, and this is why they catalog a number of different "imbalances" that require a "returning," capturing a surprising range of life: a movie (back in the days of Blockbuster video), a style (something unique that can be stolen which feels like a real violation), a favor (see, not all of them are necessarily bad, although favors can cut both ways), a glance (again, this can be fairly ambiguous), a servant (or server-referring to restaurants or tennis I guess), and a sewer (some things that we throw away we don't want back, but may not have a choice in the matter). The most psychologically acute of these instances, however, has to be the lines: "When you let me live my life, / you didn't do it completely / you were discreet. / Like the year I spent comparing me to you / Please return it." I don't think I have ever seen a more succinct evocation of the way we can lose ourselves to the judgments of other people, to foreign and inappropriate ideals, all by ourselves.
Of course, the real kicker here is that we have to be vulnerable, that the very possibility of legitimately two-sided interactions (the possibility of an "up-side" to all of these downsides) always has the potential to be one-sided. This is not a cheery thought, but it represents a truth that is not without its consolations: at the very least, "In the certainty of friendships you can ask / Please return it / Bring the balance back to you / in returning."
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Neko Case - "This Tornado Loves You"
In honor of the New Pornographers album "Together" that has recently come out (and which I think is excellent) my first actually music related post might as well be about something related.In this case I would like to discuss Neko Case's "This Tornado Loves You" off of her latest album, "Middle Cyclone."
Thematically, I think that the strongest reading of this the song is that it is about an obsessive, violent, and ultimately narcissistic love, something that the tornado is a perfect image of: with its spinning it forever circles only itself, and destroys everything in its path by drawing them into it. Fittingly, the physical shape of the tornado forms an "I" and, instead of dwelling on the beloved, this "love song" consists almost entirely of statements about what the tornado has done, or feels, etc.-everything is dragged into the compass of the tornado, presumably because that is what love is to such a being. The final moments of the song, where Case sings "This tornado loves you..." over and over again, perfectly embodies this repetitive circling of a mentality that, while appearing to be directed at another, is only as a form of self-relation.
I think the strange form of the title (which these last swirling lines repeat) captures this meaning quite well. If the tornado is the speaker here, then it seems odd for it to refer to itself as "This tornado." The phrase "I love you" has a pretty standard subject-verb-object structure, and so does "this tornado loves you," except for the fact that the speaker is "this tornado" and is thus referring to itself in the third person. This only happens in the title and in these swirling lines, everywhere else the speaker uses the first-person. I imagine that by referring to itself as "This tornado" it serves to make "I" and "tornado" identical with each other, suggesting that indeed these two things (selves and tornadoes) are practically interchangeable in terms of what they do. The difference between the first and the third person is ultimately collapsed, which is to say that the difference between the "I" and everyone else except for the resistant, beloved "you," is not recognized (hence the devastation). And presumably once the tornado possesses the beloved that difference will disappear as well-and so much the worse for the beloved.
Why introduce the difference in the first place if it is eventually to be collapsed? Apparently (from my very quick google research into the shallows of amateur psychology), while they generally tend to overuse the first-person to refer to what they have done, think, etc. and to draw attention to themselves, narcissists will use the third person to speak of their emotions and experiences as a way of distancing themselves from them. It is a defensive mechanism that works in the interests of the appropriation of all otherness-it is the way the tornado maintains its a strict control over its dispersal. We can see how this plays out in the song by looking at the two other repetitive sections of the song, the first where Case sings "till you stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop this madness." Here the tornado is clearly stuck on the fact that it actually experiences any resistance at all, which it can only interpret as madness. The second time the tornado is also struck on a particularly confusing element of this problem, the fact that loving another actually makes one vulnerable. The tornado can admit the experience of this vulnerability, but cannot think it through: "cause I miss, I miss, I miss, I miss...." Only the tornado's experience of missing the beloved comes through, the tornado can move beyond this feeling to the independent object that causes it only with great difficulty and in a qualified way: "how you'd sigh yourself to sleep when I'd rake the spring tide (?) across your sheets." At this point the tornado can only admit to missing the gratitude the beloved gave for the tornado's actions. Seen in light of these issues, the phrase "this tornado loves you" is the terrifying resolution of this whole "problem," a perfect articulation of the tornado's final perspective.
As the above already indicates, this narcissism is completely unable to comprehend how love, much less any form of real mutual recognition, actually works, and can only conceive of the whole situation in the most twisted, instrumental form. It is all about trying to manipulate or force the other to do what the narcissist wants them to do. In those final moments when Case's singing of "This tornado loves you" swirls around, it is punctuated by cries of "What will make you believe me?" While that particular expression is commonplace enough in itself so as not to raise suspicion, given what goes on in the rest of the song the force implied in making someone believe something takes on a more sinister cast. At the very least it shows a remarkable lack of psychological insight insofar as forced belief (or love) is not the kind of belief that we really value. Related to this is the fact that the tornado sees the solution to this problem to be that the beloved merely has to come to believe in its love shows how one-sided this all is: I'm sure that in cases like this the beloved has no trouble in believing that the tornado is in love (or some twisted version of it), but that probably only makes the experience more terrifying.
Oh yeah, the song is also filled with images of death and destruction that only confirm these "diagnoses"-but really, this post has surely gone on for long enough, so I don't want to beat this dead horse for so long that I end up in tornado territory myself.
I don't know if such post lengths will be typical or not, but you can see why this one took awhile to finally get around to.
Thematically, I think that the strongest reading of this the song is that it is about an obsessive, violent, and ultimately narcissistic love, something that the tornado is a perfect image of: with its spinning it forever circles only itself, and destroys everything in its path by drawing them into it. Fittingly, the physical shape of the tornado forms an "I" and, instead of dwelling on the beloved, this "love song" consists almost entirely of statements about what the tornado has done, or feels, etc.-everything is dragged into the compass of the tornado, presumably because that is what love is to such a being. The final moments of the song, where Case sings "This tornado loves you..." over and over again, perfectly embodies this repetitive circling of a mentality that, while appearing to be directed at another, is only as a form of self-relation.
I think the strange form of the title (which these last swirling lines repeat) captures this meaning quite well. If the tornado is the speaker here, then it seems odd for it to refer to itself as "This tornado." The phrase "I love you" has a pretty standard subject-verb-object structure, and so does "this tornado loves you," except for the fact that the speaker is "this tornado" and is thus referring to itself in the third person. This only happens in the title and in these swirling lines, everywhere else the speaker uses the first-person. I imagine that by referring to itself as "This tornado" it serves to make "I" and "tornado" identical with each other, suggesting that indeed these two things (selves and tornadoes) are practically interchangeable in terms of what they do. The difference between the first and the third person is ultimately collapsed, which is to say that the difference between the "I" and everyone else except for the resistant, beloved "you," is not recognized (hence the devastation). And presumably once the tornado possesses the beloved that difference will disappear as well-and so much the worse for the beloved.
Why introduce the difference in the first place if it is eventually to be collapsed? Apparently (from my very quick google research into the shallows of amateur psychology), while they generally tend to overuse the first-person to refer to what they have done, think, etc. and to draw attention to themselves, narcissists will use the third person to speak of their emotions and experiences as a way of distancing themselves from them. It is a defensive mechanism that works in the interests of the appropriation of all otherness-it is the way the tornado maintains its a strict control over its dispersal. We can see how this plays out in the song by looking at the two other repetitive sections of the song, the first where Case sings "till you stop it, stop it, stop it, stop it, stop this madness." Here the tornado is clearly stuck on the fact that it actually experiences any resistance at all, which it can only interpret as madness. The second time the tornado is also struck on a particularly confusing element of this problem, the fact that loving another actually makes one vulnerable. The tornado can admit the experience of this vulnerability, but cannot think it through: "cause I miss, I miss, I miss, I miss...." Only the tornado's experience of missing the beloved comes through, the tornado can move beyond this feeling to the independent object that causes it only with great difficulty and in a qualified way: "how you'd sigh yourself to sleep when I'd rake the spring tide (?) across your sheets." At this point the tornado can only admit to missing the gratitude the beloved gave for the tornado's actions. Seen in light of these issues, the phrase "this tornado loves you" is the terrifying resolution of this whole "problem," a perfect articulation of the tornado's final perspective.
As the above already indicates, this narcissism is completely unable to comprehend how love, much less any form of real mutual recognition, actually works, and can only conceive of the whole situation in the most twisted, instrumental form. It is all about trying to manipulate or force the other to do what the narcissist wants them to do. In those final moments when Case's singing of "This tornado loves you" swirls around, it is punctuated by cries of "What will make you believe me?" While that particular expression is commonplace enough in itself so as not to raise suspicion, given what goes on in the rest of the song the force implied in making someone believe something takes on a more sinister cast. At the very least it shows a remarkable lack of psychological insight insofar as forced belief (or love) is not the kind of belief that we really value. Related to this is the fact that the tornado sees the solution to this problem to be that the beloved merely has to come to believe in its love shows how one-sided this all is: I'm sure that in cases like this the beloved has no trouble in believing that the tornado is in love (or some twisted version of it), but that probably only makes the experience more terrifying.
Oh yeah, the song is also filled with images of death and destruction that only confirm these "diagnoses"-but really, this post has surely gone on for long enough, so I don't want to beat this dead horse for so long that I end up in tornado territory myself.
I don't know if such post lengths will be typical or not, but you can see why this one took awhile to finally get around to.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Numero Uno
In the triumphant manifesto that is to follow I will spell out the intentions that have led me to start blogging. They might not be intentions I stick with for very long, but at least they provide some context for how this whole thing got started: I seem to spend a fair amount of my time driving, and in order to maintain my sanity while doing so I listen to a lot of music. If I hear a song enough times (and loudly sing along with it in the relative privacy of the car) I often try to think through the lyrics, either because they don't make a lot of sense, or because they are particularly rich and suggestive. In both the former and latter cases, sometimes things come together and sometimes not, but I find the process of working through them to be enjoyable. It is this process (and its results) that I will document here.
And now the caveats: there probably isn't a lot of intellectual heavy-lifting to be had here, after all this is pop music, not high modernist poetry (a teenage as opposed to an adult wasteland, I guess). Similarly, my knowledge of music (especially its technical aspects) is limited, and so, as many would undoubtedly say, is my taste. You've been warned.
And now the caveats: there probably isn't a lot of intellectual heavy-lifting to be had here, after all this is pop music, not high modernist poetry (a teenage as opposed to an adult wasteland, I guess). Similarly, my knowledge of music (especially its technical aspects) is limited, and so, as many would undoubtedly say, is my taste. You've been warned.
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