Ok, so as a change of pace after the earnestness of the Fleet Foxes I have decided to pick on some terrible music. Now, while the pace may change the issue at stake will not: just like the first verse of "Helplessness Blues," the songs I will deal with here are all about indeterminacy and vagueness. However, while "Helplessness Blues" deals with indeterminacy, these songs deal in it. But hey, there's nothing like the levity that comes from criticizing the ineptness of others to ease thoughts of the predicament of modernity.
Anyway, first up on the chopping block is a song that oozed steadily from the radio a few years ago, James Blunt's "You're Beautiful." To be blunt (I'm sure that joke's been overused, but he's all about overuse, over-emoting, and overkill so it's fitting), this song is about as beautiful as a Hallmark card. But then again, it is designed to appeal to people for whom bland simplicity and sentimentality are the hallmarks of beauty (clearly a different kind of terrible beauty than Yeats' kind). I've included the version with lyrics so you can gaze at them and tremble, mortal.
Now, just as the bizarre mixture of childishness and adult sexuality in Fergie's "Big Girls Don't Cry" made for a telling if probably unintended example of the unthinking sexualization of young children, the fit between form and content in "Beautiful" is likewise unintentionally apt. The shallowness of this song, musically and lyrically is only matched by the shallowness of its theme: love at first (and only) sight.
Skipping past the less than brilliant opening, the first verse chronicle's the singer's encounter on the subway with a woman:
My love is pure.
I saw an angel.
Of that I'm sure.
She smiled at me on the subway.
She was with another man.
But I won't lose no sleep on that,
'Cause I've got a plan.
This verse perfectly illustrates why I am suspicious of claims of love at first sight. The "purity" of the love involved here is the purity of nothingness (or pure horse shit). After all, what basis is there for this outpouring of song? Nothing but a brief smile, which I am inclined to think was more a social nicety (or an awkward reaction, since "She could see from my face that I was, Flying/Fucking high," and there's nothing sexier than drug-addled creep leering at you on the subway) than a come hither stare. The love on display here is unrelated to everything actually important about this woman (who she is, what she's actually like, or what she thinks and feels, for instance) other than her beauty. But this beauty--and this is where the significance of this post's title kicks in--is itself utterly meaningless and empty. The problem with "beautiful" is that it the way it is used here it is really more of an evaluative rather than a descriptive term, i.e., it tells us less about the object than the speaker's relation to the object. That relation is extremely tenuous (and maybe a little creepy as well) so we are left with a love song that, like most love songs, is mostly about the shallow ego of its singer. The best he can come up with is to describe her as an angel, but that only works since there is really nothing human about her so she might as well be some kind of imaginary/mythological figure.
So, rather than being romantic this song is actually quite misogynistic in the way that it reduces her to an occasion to fantasize. The indeterminacy of "you're beautiful" means that it ends up being an insult instead of a compliment.
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Fleet Foxes - "Helplessness Blues" (Part Two)
So, with the rejection of the empty uniqueness of a pure and "heroic" individualism, the exploration of what other conceptions of the self continues. The "cog in a machine" approach is abandoned not just because of the vagueness evident in its introduction, but because of its determinism and the loss of freedom that that entails.
To illustrate this the next lines explore the idea of a "cog in the machine" by referencing its closest historical analogue in the questions
"What’s my name?
What’s my station?
Oh just tell me what I should do."
The notion of an identity (a name) and a role (a station) that is dictated by some kind of social hierarchy is, of course, an old idea. The cohesion of feudal and tribal societies, for instance, is owed largely to such structures. Against the cold, disenchanted and alienated backdrop of modernity, it may be comforting to hearken back to the time when someone could "just tell me what I should do" and for that to be in itself authoritative.
Part of what I admire about this song is the way that it can entertain these kinds of tempting positions (even if only in the space of a line or two) without embracing them as an easy way out. The song quickly shows why the "cog in a machine"/"tell me what I should do" kind of submission to some kind of external influence is not a viable option:
"I don’t need to be kind to the armies of night
who would do such injustice to you.
Or bow down and be grateful,
and say ‘Sure take all that you see,'
to the men who move only in dimly lit halls
and determine my future for me."
Exactly what injustice is being referred to is not clear, but the idea surely is. While I may have associated this "cog"/"hierarchy" with older values and social structures, that is not to say that it is by any means confined to the past. At the beginning of my previous post I mentioned the sense in which the Fleet foxes are continuing the Folk movement's tradition of protesting injustice, and we can certainly recognize this kind of injustice in the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis (and subsequent recession). The moral of this story for any age, then, is that to simply surrender your autonomy along with your individuality is risk losing everything.
What is the answer then? The closest thing to one comes with the second half of the song, which is marked by a distinct change from the strident tempo of the first part to a much warmer, majestically sprawling sound. This difference in sound, from one of searching to one of celebration, reverence, satisfaction, certainly suggests a more tenable position. This position is marked in particular by the replacement of the cog/machine imagery with the organic figure of tending to an orchard:
"If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm raw.
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore.
And you would wait tables
and soon run the store.
Gold hair in the sunlight,
my light in the dawn.
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore."
What works here is clearly the suggestive difference between the cog/machine relationship and the orchardist/orchard. The orchardist (I know it's an awkward word, but what else is there?) is active and self-determining in a way that the cog clearly is not, yet that actively is circumscribed by that of the orchard itself. The reciprocity to be had in this situation is clearly preferably to its lack in either of the initial options provided by the song.
There is a similar movement encapsulated in the lines about waiting tables and then running the store, where the trend is to go from some kind of servitude to autonomy. I am a little dubious about this side of it, however, because the job waiting tables seems like something necessitated by the move to the orchards in the first place. That certainly might mitigate the satisfaction to be had from finally running the store (I speak from experience here).
But of course it is important to keep in mind that this whole section and the kind of reconciliation that it represents, as beautiful as it is, operates under the auspices of a series of "ifs." The beauty of this section is the beauty of a dream or a wish. It is for this reason that I don't want to be too harsh on this section. Normally, as someone who spent a very long and painful week raking blueberries, and who has known plenty of farmers, I am more than a little wary of any attempt to romanticize the kind of backbreaking labour that goes with farming. The persistent recognition that there is a tremendous amount of ache and soreness to that life tempers this, but even more importantly I think that the emphasis on soreness is a measure of the difficulty of the reconciliation projected here. Indeed, this reconciliation might only be possible in a dream, or a work of art like a song, or a movie, as the last line of the song suggests: "Some day I'll be like the man on the screen..."
To illustrate this the next lines explore the idea of a "cog in the machine" by referencing its closest historical analogue in the questions
"What’s my name?
What’s my station?
Oh just tell me what I should do."
The notion of an identity (a name) and a role (a station) that is dictated by some kind of social hierarchy is, of course, an old idea. The cohesion of feudal and tribal societies, for instance, is owed largely to such structures. Against the cold, disenchanted and alienated backdrop of modernity, it may be comforting to hearken back to the time when someone could "just tell me what I should do" and for that to be in itself authoritative.
Part of what I admire about this song is the way that it can entertain these kinds of tempting positions (even if only in the space of a line or two) without embracing them as an easy way out. The song quickly shows why the "cog in a machine"/"tell me what I should do" kind of submission to some kind of external influence is not a viable option:
"I don’t need to be kind to the armies of night
who would do such injustice to you.
Or bow down and be grateful,
and say ‘Sure take all that you see,'
to the men who move only in dimly lit halls
and determine my future for me."
Exactly what injustice is being referred to is not clear, but the idea surely is. While I may have associated this "cog"/"hierarchy" with older values and social structures, that is not to say that it is by any means confined to the past. At the beginning of my previous post I mentioned the sense in which the Fleet foxes are continuing the Folk movement's tradition of protesting injustice, and we can certainly recognize this kind of injustice in the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis (and subsequent recession). The moral of this story for any age, then, is that to simply surrender your autonomy along with your individuality is risk losing everything.
What is the answer then? The closest thing to one comes with the second half of the song, which is marked by a distinct change from the strident tempo of the first part to a much warmer, majestically sprawling sound. This difference in sound, from one of searching to one of celebration, reverence, satisfaction, certainly suggests a more tenable position. This position is marked in particular by the replacement of the cog/machine imagery with the organic figure of tending to an orchard:
"If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm raw.
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore.
And you would wait tables
and soon run the store.
Gold hair in the sunlight,
my light in the dawn.
If I had an orchard
I'd work till I'm sore."
What works here is clearly the suggestive difference between the cog/machine relationship and the orchardist/orchard. The orchardist (I know it's an awkward word, but what else is there?) is active and self-determining in a way that the cog clearly is not, yet that actively is circumscribed by that of the orchard itself. The reciprocity to be had in this situation is clearly preferably to its lack in either of the initial options provided by the song.
There is a similar movement encapsulated in the lines about waiting tables and then running the store, where the trend is to go from some kind of servitude to autonomy. I am a little dubious about this side of it, however, because the job waiting tables seems like something necessitated by the move to the orchards in the first place. That certainly might mitigate the satisfaction to be had from finally running the store (I speak from experience here).
But of course it is important to keep in mind that this whole section and the kind of reconciliation that it represents, as beautiful as it is, operates under the auspices of a series of "ifs." The beauty of this section is the beauty of a dream or a wish. It is for this reason that I don't want to be too harsh on this section. Normally, as someone who spent a very long and painful week raking blueberries, and who has known plenty of farmers, I am more than a little wary of any attempt to romanticize the kind of backbreaking labour that goes with farming. The persistent recognition that there is a tremendous amount of ache and soreness to that life tempers this, but even more importantly I think that the emphasis on soreness is a measure of the difficulty of the reconciliation projected here. Indeed, this reconciliation might only be possible in a dream, or a work of art like a song, or a movie, as the last line of the song suggests: "Some day I'll be like the man on the screen..."
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Fleet Foxes - "Helplessness Blues" (Part One)
Back in its heyday folk music was all about protesting injustice, so it shouldn't be surprising that the Fleet Foxes, a band with folksy inflections to their baroque pop creations, would write the closest thing to a protest song I've heard in awhile. (Of course, I'm not exactly on the lookout for protest songs, so I'm no authority on such things).
Anyway, the Fleet Foxes' song "Helplessness Blues," released last year and therefore just a little before the Occupy movements got off the ground (and in the middle of the "recovery" from a recession) is a great song that reflects the spirit of that movement.
As we shall see, some of the song is centered around economic issues, but it also goes much deeper than that to question some of the central elements of the modern ethos of which the woes of capitalism are only a part. The song opens with a reconsideration of an extreme notion of individuality:
“I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique,
like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes,
unique in each way you’d conceive."
What is immediately apparent in these lines is the emptiness of this conception of uniqueness: being "somehow" unique says about as much here as being "unique in each way you'd conceive." Each form of "uniqueness" is essentially an empty vessel that has to be filled by real content. found in life in order to be really meaningful. This real content is part of the world that we share with others-the actions, relations, and roles, i.e., the things that we care about and that occupy our time in daily life. Even the distinctness of snowflakes from each other depends upon the overarching similarity of what each shares as a snowflakes (a fact alluded to by the repetition of the word "snowflake" in the line). Likewise, the fact that this song begins as an account of what the singer was raised up to believe, his being raised suggests that any individuality to be had is tempered by the actions and ideas of others
Despite the emptiness of this kind of uniqueness, this conception of it underwrites a lot of our culture's deeply held beliefs about individuality and originality. Indeed, the middle line about "a snowflake distinct among snowflakes" reminds me of something I often heard when I was younger (and would likely hear again if I spent more time around children): adults would tell children that each of them was unique; like snowflakes, no two are identical. This was, I believe, meant to make them feel good about themselves as if their uniqueness was a great achievement worth being proud of (so was everyone else's apparently). The falseness of this idea is evident from the fact that many of the most boring and irritating people I have ever met were people who considered their originality their finest quality-rarely have I ever heard uttered so many formulaic and uninspired declarations as from the mouth of an "original."
While the historical nature of every human life means that we are undoubtedly unique and irreplaceable (contra Beyonce, who reveals a certain callousness in her song "Irreplaceable") in a basic sense, I would hardly rank uniqueness among the most worthy of human qualities. Mere uniqueness cannot hold a candle to courage, intelligence, or humour, for instance. The conception of individuality that puts some form of uniqueness and originality ahead of all else as the defining quality of a person fails to recognize the greater importance these others, perhaps because they do not pertain solely to the individual, but lead outward.
For these reasons the song turns and rejects this individualism in the space of the same verse:
"And now after some thinking
I’d say I’d rather be
a functioning cog in some great machinery
serving something beyond me."
On the one hand, this represents a radical step forward, a rejection of individualism so extreme that it seems to fall into its opposite, some kind of blind and mechanical determinism or collectivism where nothing is anything but a piece of something larger. But on the other hand, it is only a half-step, as the singer is not fully committed to this position at all: it comes to him as the result of thinking, and exists in the form of a preference or a desire, not as something already realized in his life. Furthermore, as with the individualism of the initial lines, there is a lot of vagueness to this position, as we are left with "some great machinery" that is "something beyond me"-not exactly the stuff of great passions and the grand ends of life. Even my recourse to such a vague sentence as the one that contains the words, "nothing is anything but a piece of something larger," to describe it suggests that this position is perhaps not much of improvement. The yearning to be part of something larger, to be connected with the world as a whole, is there in an inchoate form, but it has yet to be realized adequately in thought, much less in action. This is why the song takes its first really dramatic turn, introducing the harmonies for which the Fleet Foxes are famous, as well as making explicit the confusion signified by all of the vagueness and indeterminacy of the earlier lines: " But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be,/ I’ll get back to you someday, soon you will see.”
Anyway, the Fleet Foxes' song "Helplessness Blues," released last year and therefore just a little before the Occupy movements got off the ground (and in the middle of the "recovery" from a recession) is a great song that reflects the spirit of that movement.
As we shall see, some of the song is centered around economic issues, but it also goes much deeper than that to question some of the central elements of the modern ethos of which the woes of capitalism are only a part. The song opens with a reconsideration of an extreme notion of individuality:
“I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique,
like a snowflake distinct among snowflakes,
unique in each way you’d conceive."
What is immediately apparent in these lines is the emptiness of this conception of uniqueness: being "somehow" unique says about as much here as being "unique in each way you'd conceive." Each form of "uniqueness" is essentially an empty vessel that has to be filled by real content. found in life in order to be really meaningful. This real content is part of the world that we share with others-the actions, relations, and roles, i.e., the things that we care about and that occupy our time in daily life. Even the distinctness of snowflakes from each other depends upon the overarching similarity of what each shares as a snowflakes (a fact alluded to by the repetition of the word "snowflake" in the line). Likewise, the fact that this song begins as an account of what the singer was raised up to believe, his being raised suggests that any individuality to be had is tempered by the actions and ideas of others
Despite the emptiness of this kind of uniqueness, this conception of it underwrites a lot of our culture's deeply held beliefs about individuality and originality. Indeed, the middle line about "a snowflake distinct among snowflakes" reminds me of something I often heard when I was younger (and would likely hear again if I spent more time around children): adults would tell children that each of them was unique; like snowflakes, no two are identical. This was, I believe, meant to make them feel good about themselves as if their uniqueness was a great achievement worth being proud of (so was everyone else's apparently). The falseness of this idea is evident from the fact that many of the most boring and irritating people I have ever met were people who considered their originality their finest quality-rarely have I ever heard uttered so many formulaic and uninspired declarations as from the mouth of an "original."
While the historical nature of every human life means that we are undoubtedly unique and irreplaceable (contra Beyonce, who reveals a certain callousness in her song "Irreplaceable") in a basic sense, I would hardly rank uniqueness among the most worthy of human qualities. Mere uniqueness cannot hold a candle to courage, intelligence, or humour, for instance. The conception of individuality that puts some form of uniqueness and originality ahead of all else as the defining quality of a person fails to recognize the greater importance these others, perhaps because they do not pertain solely to the individual, but lead outward.
For these reasons the song turns and rejects this individualism in the space of the same verse:
"And now after some thinking
I’d say I’d rather be
a functioning cog in some great machinery
serving something beyond me."
On the one hand, this represents a radical step forward, a rejection of individualism so extreme that it seems to fall into its opposite, some kind of blind and mechanical determinism or collectivism where nothing is anything but a piece of something larger. But on the other hand, it is only a half-step, as the singer is not fully committed to this position at all: it comes to him as the result of thinking, and exists in the form of a preference or a desire, not as something already realized in his life. Furthermore, as with the individualism of the initial lines, there is a lot of vagueness to this position, as we are left with "some great machinery" that is "something beyond me"-not exactly the stuff of great passions and the grand ends of life. Even my recourse to such a vague sentence as the one that contains the words, "nothing is anything but a piece of something larger," to describe it suggests that this position is perhaps not much of improvement. The yearning to be part of something larger, to be connected with the world as a whole, is there in an inchoate form, but it has yet to be realized adequately in thought, much less in action. This is why the song takes its first really dramatic turn, introducing the harmonies for which the Fleet Foxes are famous, as well as making explicit the confusion signified by all of the vagueness and indeterminacy of the earlier lines: " But I don’t, I don’t know what that will be,/ I’ll get back to you someday, soon you will see.”
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