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.