The Mountains Goats - "The Birth of Serpents"

Anyway, to finally get back to The Mountain Goats, the song I’d like to discuss first is the one that, if it didn’t exactly serve as a gateway to them, it was at least the first of theirs that really got under my skin and earned my devotion: “The Birth of Serpents.” 

I’ve linked the David Letterman version because it’s really awesome (the live performances I’ve seen on YouTube are pretty electrifying, Darnielle, the lead Goat, really inhabits them emotionally). So, speaking of getting under the skin, the first thing that struck my about this song was this stand-out line about halfway through the song: “See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest.” There is a lot to unpack about this line alone, not only in itself but also in how it connects to the rest of the song.

To begin with, the line itself is a psychologically astute description of a certain kind of (somewhat self-inflicted) misery. There are a variety of ways that someone can be at odds with themselves in this way. Drug abuse is a particularly relevant example, esp. considering that the content of practically an entire Mountain Goats album, “We Shall All be Healed,” is drawn from Darnielle’s experiences as a meth user. Anyway, the kind of damage that drug use can inflict on one’s body (along with the damage that comes of the accompanying lifestyle) certainly resembles the careless destruction (or at best neglect) of an uninvited guest. But being at odds with oneself is not limited to drug abuse, I have certainly seen people who are not comfortable with their bodies in all sorts of ways: those with self-esteem or self-image problems; those who are uncomfortable with the bodily or the sexual, often for religiously-derived reasons; and those who, for whatever reason, have never developed their physical capabilities but then are called upon to use them (I can recall having to help teach a fourteen year-old boy who styled himself a cultured aesthete how to run—something that is difficult to teach precisely because the details of learning it lurk so far back in most of our histories).

The very title of the song does offer hope: insofar as the song is about the “birth of serpents,” there is the possibility of shedding one’s skin, growing out of one’s problems, being reborn or regenerated. At first sight the image of shedding one’s skin doesn’t make sense here: surely the solution to “dwelling inside one’s body like an uninvited guest” is to learn to properly dwell within one’s body, so that the fault lies with oneself, not with the body. However, particularly if drugs are involved, the opposite may also be true. The degree to which drug addiction is a physical force and operates on a physiological level, means that to a certain extent it could be said that the fault could very well lie with the body, that one’s body might no longer be hospitable and that we can only dwell within it as a uninvited guest. In this case, the therapeutic possibilities of shedding one’s skin, i.e., cleansing or detoxing the body, are clear. (Of course, you could simply say that what you have to shed in this case is simply one’s way of life or something like that, and you wouldn’t be wrong to say so, but what I think that explanation misses is the extent to which a very bodily form of self-relation is at stake here.)

Anyway, the interesting this how the song proposes this detox as a literal form of shedding one’s skin by getting outside of oneself. Consider the first two verses of the song, which are about self-reflection in the form of reflecting on one’s (literally) external image by way of photography:

Let the camera pull back till the fullness of the frame is clear 

and plain

Peer into the screen until you see it all

Like a vision in a crystal ball

Let it all fill with smoke

Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?

The very first line introduces the camera as a tool that brings things and their context (their frame) into focus. The last line about it being a joke points to the kind of defensiveness and disbelief that meets such a process at the outset (and thereby points to the need for such a process). The objectivity of photography promises a picture of how things are that is not clouded by the vagaries of a biased (and potentially drug-addled) memory. The song dwells on the process of developing a picture—of exposing it—as a process of being exposed to the truth about oneself:

Let the fixer work until the silver’s washed away

And take the picture from the tray

Look hard at what you see and then remember you and me

And let the truth spring free

Like a jack in a box

Like a hundred thousand cuckoo-clocks

The lesson in this seems to be that one actually has to shed one’s skin in order to properly inhabit it, or to put in an amusingly paradoxical way, sometimes in order to become who we want to be we have to stop being ourselves. Self-reflection sometimes requires self-estrangement, which is the triumph recorded in the following lines:

Let the camera do its dirty work down there in the dark

Sink low, rise high, and bring some blurry pictures to remember all your darker moments by.

A Return?

It has been a long time since I have written here. For those who know me personally the reasons are no doubt obvious—hundreds of pages of dissertation (only some of which actually made it into the final draft) needed to come first. But I want to keep writing, to keep practicing my writing, and to practice keeping on writing, so this is an outlet I would do well to take advantage of to keep up that practice up when other avenues are not so fruitful.

While I have a line-up of topics I had already begun writing about before my long hiatus, I think a return to this forum needs something new—something that inspired me a great deal while I was absent from this space. That something is the band The Mountain Goats, who I will write at least a little about here and probably a great deal more in the time to come (if it comes).

But before that, another (long) preliminary: I should like to talk a little about why I think and write about music in such a long, drawn-out, and overly intellectual way. I’m not sure when it began, but for as long as I can remember I have always cared about musical lyrics and the meanings of songs. I listen to a song well enough that I try to interpret it like a poem—to be able to say what it is about, but also to be able to comment on what it is about is all about. Thinking about how The Posies’ “Please Return It” is about the inevitable vulnerability that goes along with all human relations, is to also think about the extent to which that is true, to gauge the accuracy and scope of that idea as it occurs in the song and in life, and to try to understand what particular spin and particular pathos the song brings to these recognitions. I enjoy exploring this side of music—indeed, to me this kind of understanding is entirely bound up with my enjoyment of not just music but virtually all art. 

I guess this makes me an inveterate intellectualizer, but the thing about art is that when it is successful it goes beyond mere intellectualization, that’s the point of making a work of art rather than an essay or treatise. And I don’t really mean to disparage intellectualization, as I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as such (and tend to engage in it myself), it’s just that it can be in danger of becoming abstract or arid without something to liven it up. This kind of position is also part of what makes me an inveterate Hegelian and makes this a blog about the speculative content of music, because it is, I think, reaching after a form of reason that is a more thoroughly holistic form of thought which is the hallmark of the “speculative” for Hegel.