Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #5: The Posies--"Golden Blunders"

It’s time to combine two great things (in my estimation at least): The Posies and Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies. Given the Posies’ penchant for writing (relatively) shiny pop music about twisted and dark things it should not be surprising that one of the singles off of their major label debut Dear 23, is actually a song about unintended pregnancy (that’s the golden blunder).

Now, at first it is not exactly clear that this is what the song is about, as the first lines of the song point only to the general theme of the mistakes that we make as we grow up:

Golden blunders come in pairs, they’re very unaware
What they know is what they’ve seen
Education wasn’t fun, but now that school is done
Higher learning’s just begun.

I appreciate the jab at the practical limitations of schooling here—both in terms of the incredible tedium that can accompany it and the fact that so much learning has nothing to do with testable facts and far more to do with the development of judgement (that’s the real higher learning, not university). Indeed, judgement is key because it does not depend upon rules but experience because it must be so responsive to context (in this regard Kant and Aristotle would agree in an awkward way). 
 
Long story short, acquiring judgement requires experience, and a crucial element of that experience is failure and making mistakes, which is precisely what the chorus says:

You're gonna watch what you say for a long time
You're gonna suffer the guilt forever
You're gonna get in the way at the wrong time
You're gonna mess up things you thought you would never.
 
Now before diving into the rest of the song, I want to return to the question of the title and how it relates to this chorus (I’ll get there eventually, it just takes a bit of a detour into Beatles-land, a fact that shouldn’t be surprising given the melodic stylings of the Posies’ early recordings). Part of the title is a reference to The Beatles’ song “Golden Slumbers” from Abbey Road (a fact made more interesting by the fact that Ringo Starr recorded a cover of this song—although the original Posies version is much better). “Golden Slumbers” is an adaption of an old lullaby, and it is a soothing song. But the fact that you need a soothing song implies that is something troubling you, and the recurring lines of the song seem to be the suggestion that you can never go back home:

Once there was a way

to get back homeward.

Once there was a way

To get back home.

There once was a way to make everything fine again, to go back home, but after a certain point that’s no longer possible and then all you can do is look for the comfort of a lullaby and go to sleep, to forget your blunders for a little while. Ok, so the connection is pretty loose at this point, but “Golden Slumbers” is part of a medley and its leads into “Carry that Weight,” which has these lines which the Posies are clearly referencing both thematically and melodically: “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight for a long time, / Carry that weight a long time.” Couple this with the fact that “Carry that Weight” references an earlier song on the album that is about growing up and making mistakes and feeling lost (“You Never Give Me Your Money”--although that song is also about The Beatles financial situation), and you suddenly have a much clearer sense of the referential web that The Posies are weaving here.

And now to get to the pregnancy part, if “Golden Slumbers” is a lullaby (and hence something you would sing to a child), then “Golden Blunders” works as a kind of lullaby that you sing to children on their way to becoming adults and, as it turns out, on their way to having children of their own. The lyrics that follow are certainly and obviously about the perils of committing to someone heedlessly, but there are hints that pregnancy is as big a danger as anything in this arrangement:

His and hers forever more, throw your freedom out of the door
Before you find out what it's for
(Chorus)
Four weeks seemed like a long time then - but nine months is longer now
But even if you never speak again - you've already made the wedding vow

The loss of freedom that comes from getting together with someone, even it actually goes as far as marrying them, is something, sure, but it pales in comparison to having a child with them. That’s what the “four weeks” to “nine months” comparison is about, and that is the real “wedding vow.” It is the responsibility for a new life coming from the irresponsibility of a brief and (relatively) meaningless interlude that gives the chorus its drama and weight (a weight that the mother will literally have to carry).

This being established, the last thing that I will note is that I find it quite surprising how moral and preachy this song gets at the end:

Honeymoons will never start, bonds will blow apart
Just as fast as they were made
Men and women please beware: don't pretend you care
Nothing lasts when nothing's there.

It’s not bad advice, but it seems rare for pop songs to carry explicit advice like this, especially since it is advice that may result in not having sex with someone, and may require exercising responsibility. While The Posies were never this preachy again, I feel like this was probably a bad indication of their mainstream rock star potential.

Selena Gomez--"Love you Like a Love Song"

So, in the course of thinking about abstraction in my last post I considered picking on Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song” because its a song that I’ve had to suffer through more times than I’d care to and the blandness of the title (which is also about 90% of the lyrical content of the song) speaks to its featureless abstraction.

After all, given the general blandness of most love songs, to say something like I love you like a love song sounds like it is just compounding abstraction upon abstraction. But even though the song isn’t good or enjoyable, upon listening to it a little more closely I can at least say that the song wears its abstraction knowingly, perhaps even to the extent that it could be said that it is unconsciously critical of its entire genre. Maybe that last claim stretches it too far, but I try not to be too abstract myself by one-sidedly condemning things (see Hegel’s twistedly charming little essay Who Thinks Abstractly? for an abstruse but fun illustration of how easy it is to be abstract without knowing it—also note that there is nothing redeemable about Fergie’s “Me Myself I”).

Anyway, if you want to follow me down this path, just consider the line “I love you like a love song.” Its pretty bland since there is nothing unexpected or unusual about the simile, and verbally the repetition of the word “love” contributes to this (as does the near-endless repetition of the line itself). But all of this should not let us overlook what it means to love someone like a love song, for it is not as if the two terms of comparison are identical. Love songs tend to portray the extremes of love: intense obsession (I’m thinking primarily of the very first moments of falling in love, but also the scarier forms of obsession) and heartbreak, but they also tend to be simple, catchy and repetitive, which is to say, the very epitome of pop songs.

What’s worth noticing is the way that these two sets of qualities tend to go together—obsession and heartbreak alike tend to provoke repetition: “I need to see them again,” “I can’t stop thinking about them,” etc. This need for repetition, it seems to me, comes from the fact that both obsession and heartbreak are defined by the lack of their object. Both are in their own way blinded to the reality of their object by the desire for its possession, a fact that renders the whole relation rather abstract and thus in need of constant reinforcement.

In this regard perhaps there is something to this idea that there is a type of love like a love song: one that is intense, immediate, overly dramatic, and a matter of compulsive repetition in order to keep the feeling alive. And there is one more commonality linked to these, the abstractness of the love song, which we see in the vagueness of the image of the beloved and concomitant overemphasis upon the lover’s relatively unanchored feelings. This abstractness helps to fulfil the function of the love song, which is to promote identification with the song’s affect and to prompt its repetition. After all, the more abstract the lover and beloved the easier it is to project one’s own feelings onto them while at the same time enjoying their apparent objectification.

The qualities of abstraction and repetition at in the love song here happen to be just what Gomez’s song is about, particularly if you note that the line after the repetition of “I love you like a love song” is “And I keep hittin’ repeat-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat.” While this message comes through more on a formal level through its intense repetition than any real lyrical exploration, even at the level of its lyrics there is self-awareness about this fact, as the beginning of the song introduces its context as one of the depletion of the content of a love song in favour of repetition:

“It's been said and done
Every beautiful thought's been already sung
And I guess right now here's another one”

Now to return to the issue of abstractness, I guess we can say that this is a song that at least semi-self-consciously revels in its own abstractness by making itself into the formal convergence of love and love song and the abandonment of any content.

Bruce Springsteen--"Into the Fire"

I’ve railed against abstraction in other songs--”Renegades,” for instance—but in listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Into the Fire” recently, I have also been thinking about when it works.

After all, abstraction is not automatically a bad thing, its just that works of art are traditionally all about concreteness (although the 20^th century certainly explored the exceptions to this tradition, though often in terms of sensory abstraction or purity), so it often feels like a cheap betrayal of what art can be when, instead of something specific, all we get are bland and vague generalities.

On the face of it, the chorus of “Into the Fire” is largely a string of abstractions:

“May your strength give us strength,

May your faith give us faith,

May your hope give us hope,

May your love give us love.”

Not only are those abstractions repeated within the line (“strength...strength,” etc.), but they are repeated continuously throughout the song. But even though strength, faith, hope, and love are some of the most potentially vague and empty and overused terms, they don’t feel like it here. There are at least two reasons for this.

The first reason is that they have a very particular context in this song. “Into the Fire” comes from Springsteen’s album The Rising, which was written as a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which the very first lines of the song evoke:

"The sky was falling and streaked with blood
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs,
Into the fire"

The falling sky, the fire, blood, and dust are all images of the devastation of 9/11, and the lines “Up the stairs, into the fire,” refer to the actions of the emergency personnel, particularly the firefighters, who went towards the danger—up the stairs, into the fire—while everyone else was fleeing it. The person this song is directed to, the “you” whose strength, etc., is being called upon, is one of these firefighters, so that context already helps to fill out the meaning of these otherwise abstract terms. The different verses of the song all emphasize prioritizing self-sacrifice for the greater good over choosing a good rooted in self-interest (“I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher”). The ascent up the stairs is thus also an ascent towards higher forms of these virtues than their everyday versions.

And this brings me to the second reason why Springsteen’s invocation of them is not merely abstract. Looking at the form of the appeal to these virtues (“May your strength give us strength”), the “May your..” construction as well as their almost ritualistic repetition (complete with a choir’s worth of backup singers by the end of the song), makes their invocation more of a prayer or an appeal than anything. What this means is that instead of using abstract terms like love as a shortcut or a placeholder, this song is actually a call to fill them with emotional content. To a certain extent the subject matter of the song does this, and in another way so performative nature of these lines—by calling out for strength, so the idea goes, we gain strength.

Musical Shipwrecks: The Tragically Hip--"Nautical Disaster"

With the news that Gord Downie, the lead singer and songwriter for The Tragically Hip, was diagnosed with a terrible form of brain cancer, and with the giant (possibly farewell) concert they put on in August, The Hip are in the spotlight in a way that they haven’t been for a long time. So although I’ve never been very concerned with being current, since their song “Nautical Disaster” is definitely on my list of songs about shipwrecks, I think this is a good time to look at it (it also happens to be my favorite Hip song anyway, so that doesn’t hurt).

In terms of discussion of the song, a lot of people get hung up on trying to identify the historical referent for this particular disaster, citing anything from the landing at Dieppe in WW2, to the sinking of the Bismarck, to the Lancastria. But I am inclined to agree with the commenter wonderdog from songmeanings.com (http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/65612/ --his post is the top one, and its also useful because summarizes these historical possibilities) that connecting it to any particular historical even really doesn’t add much to the understanding of the song. If you know anything about what happens in a nautical disaster in general, then you know enough for this song. The song itself hedges its bets about the reality of this experience through the language it uses at the beginning (“I had this dream”; “It was as though”).

But what does need to be grasped is the emotional truth of this nautical disaster, and part of the reason why I think that this is the greatest song of the Hip’s is that Downie’s lyrics are so evocative. One of the high points is the imagery of “five hundred more [men] thrashing madly / As parasites might, in your blood.” The image of men struggling for their lives in the water (and 8 times their number already dead) is horrific enough, but to introduce the parasite image is to draw that horror into oneself, or imagine oneself infected by the sight of it and inspire a kind of revulsion. In part that revulsion comes from the content of the image. I think of wriggling leeches somehow on the inside, but whatever you picture when someone says parasite, I’m sure its not pretty.

What makes the image even worse, however, is if you think through the consequences of thinking of these people as internal parasites. The contempt and revulsion that we associate with parasites get transferred to these poor souls and that seems especially cruel and awful. But as the next lines in the song reveal, this attitude is necessary: these parasites must be dispatched so that we may live. In this case, it is a matter of limited space within a lifeboat:

Now I was in a lifeboat designed for ten, ten only
Anything that systematic would get you hated
It's not a deal nor a test nor a love of something fated

These lines spell out the terms of survival, with the main constraint being how many can fit into the lifeboat. This discussion comes up, I suspect, because of the guilt related to it. It is hard to cling to accept that the distinction between the living and the dead, the drowned and the saved (whichever side of it you’re on), comes down to something as banal as a number, a safety recommendation. There’s nothing preordained or noble or necessary about it, it just is what it is, and that’s hard to live with or die because of. And the same goes with the selection of the crew itself, its cold and heartless:

The selection was quick, the crew was picked in order
And those left in the water
Got kicked off our pant leg
And we headed for home

But this decision, this whole situation, is not cold and heartless in the sense of something detached or abstract like a “deal or a test or a love of something fated.” No, the sheer physicality of this decision—pick the survivors and actively fight off those who cling on anyways and head for home (without looking back? At least not immediately?)--again centres this decision squarely within the realm of survival.

But the heart of this song is the idea that no matter what justifies such a break (even survival), justification is not always enough to avoid the consequences, as the final verse in the song reminds its listeners that the previous scene was a dream:

Then the dream ends when the phone rings
"You doing all right?"
He said, "It's out there most days and nights
But only a fool would complain"
Anyway, Susan, if you like
Our conversation is as faint a sound in my memory
As those fingernails scratching on my hull

But it is not just the dream element that adds ambiguity to the song, but the abrupt shift from reporting to direct address that happens at the “Anyway, Susan” line. The phone call speaks to the existence of some kind of guilt (presumably from the events that inspired the dream, although the song never actually confirms the reality of this experience), but the end of the quote of this conversation also ends the report that began the song with “I had this dream.....” The final lines directed to Susan (which are quite devastating) is a shift that has the potential to redirect the meaning of everything that came before. Is the whole shipwreck dream simply meant to be an illustration of what is going on between the narrator and Susan—is the shipwreck at issue in this song actually the wreck of a relationship, a rumination of getting over the guilt of leaving? It may be and that’s a compelling reading, or it also may be a song about how we get on with things, where the pragmatic answer to survivor’s guilt (“only a fool would complain”) provides the context for how to deal with less troubles such as may have come up with Susan (the positive reading of that “if you like”). Or it may be about the cost of that survivor’s guilt where the narrator has trouble dealing with such troubles except through a kind of repression or active forgetting (the sarcastic reading of the “if you like”). I don’t think there is an answer, but that is what makes this so interesting.

But in praising the song it is important to give props to the music as well—the swirling guitar and bass of the intro creates an appropriate eerie and dreamlike atmosphere for Downie to set the scene. We get the musical equivalent of groping our way through the fog (perhaps the fog of a dream) before it lifts at about 0:53 to begin revealing the horror with an appropriate shift in musical intensity. At this point the drums crash insistently, almost chaotically, the cymbals being especially prominent, reflecting the general clamour and tumult off the scene. The guitar begins to pick up pace, working through faster variations of the swirling arpeggios with which the the song began, taking on a stronger presence by 1:10 (“Thrashing madly as parasite might, in your blood”) and finally becoming the signature guitar line of the song 1:43 (“It’s not a deal nor a test...). What does this guitar line “mean,” and what does it do for the song? Its insistent wavering back and forth makes me think of it as the sonic representation of the search for escape, or trying to break free. This fits with its prominence at 2:07, the point where they finally “head for home,” we begin the bridge in which that underlying guitar line winds its way through a little solo as if seeking resolution, seeking home.

Then at 2:23 we get a brief rest, almost a return to the peace of the intro (as the dream ends) but then the emotional tenor almost immediately ramps up again and the Susan section marks the return of the winding guitar line which leads to the outro sol at 3:03, an extended riff on that guitar line seeking some kind of resolution across an even broader range before the guitar line exhaust itself (perhaps) without relief at 3:40. It’s an appropriately ambiguous ending for the song and an example of how to end songs right.

Beyonce--"Irreplaceable"

This is a complex song to write about because it is difficult to know how to gauge its perspective. The song itself dramatizes a messy breakup in which one partner throws the other out of the house because of cheating. It seems to take place at the point when the cheating party is being kicked out and has to gather their possessions and remove them from the property.

What I find hard to process is the discussion of “irrepleaceability” from which the song gets its title. Here it is:

Talkin' 'bout, I'll never ever find a man like you
You got me twisted

You must not know about me, you must not know about me
I could have another you in a minute
Matter of fact, he'll be here in a minute, baby
You must not know about me, you must not know about me
I can have another you by tomorrow
So don't you ever for a second get to thinking
You're irreplaceable

The striking parts are statements like “I could have another you in a minute” and “don’t ever for a second get to to thinking you’re irreplaceable.” On the face of it this talk seems incredibly callous, showing complete disregard for the humanity of the person to whom it is directed. Furthermore, given that this person was someone who the singer had some kind of romantic (or at least sexual) relationship, it also speaks to a complete devaluing of those kinds of relationships in the singer’s life as well.

The reason why this talk of replaceability seems to offensive is because it implies a very high degree of sameness or equality to the point of denying individual identity. Indeed, replaceability is something you think about when it comes to mass-produced things, not people, and in that regard it has more to do with acquisition and possession (and dispossession) than anything. Given the element of fungability that thus goes along with it, it is telling that when it does get applied to people it is usually in an economic context, particularly when it is a question of whether someone’s function in the workplace can be filled by another. One wonders if there is a temp agency specializing in young boy-toys lurking behind the “I can have another you in a minute” line; love as transaction rather than relation.

It is not surprising then, that this breakup song is mostly concerned with the division of goods (“Everything you own in the box to the left, / In the closet that’s my stuff, yes, / If I bought it don’t touch, that’s my stuff”) rather than much explicit talk about feelings. But equally unsurprising, given the fact that money is involved here, is the power dynamic that figures prominently in this song. If the person being kicked to the curb only has enough to fit in the box, then it is the singer who seems to own everything, and who thus has all of the power in the relationship. This is particularly clear from the fact that the singer seems to have bought everything that her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend currently possesses, as she talks about his cheating by “Rollin’ her around in the car I bought you” (italics mine). This repossession of the car is also what lies behind The music video has some further fun with this repossession at 1:48 in the Vevo version (which I can't link to for some reason) when Beyonce appears to soften for a moment, caressing and undressing him, before she literally takes (reclaims!) his sweater and then pulls off his neckchain too. Typical of the capitalist bait-and-switch to play with your desire before taking even the shirt off of your back.

Ok, all of that being said, I don’t think that we can simply judge this song’s message as awful however, for a couple of reasons. First of all, its not your typical case of a rich older (often much much older) man hooking up with a much younger woman, often discarding someone (who probably still isn’t nearly as old as him) in the process. The power combined power differential of men over women plus old over young plus rich over not-rich in those situations makes that dynamic especially lopsided. Here, however, it is a woman doing this to a man, and the two are at least comparable in age and looks.

I think that this difference mitigates the situation somewhat, but even more importantly we need to remember that this song is capturing an emotional moment: the singer here feels betrayed by her lover’s cheating and we are in the middle of their confrontation. Part of the extremeness of this sentiment about replaceability comes from the emotional charge to this situation, from the hurt that the singer is feeling at being betrayed by being cheated on—by being replaced in his heart/bed. In this regard irreplaceability is at the heart of monogamy and its all or nothing logic, hence one of the final lines: “since I’m not your everything / How about I’ll be nothing / Nothing at all to you.”
The last thing to keep in mind is that the singer isn’t the one who starts all of this talk about replaceability, as she cites her ex-lover’s behavior: “Standin’ in the front yard / Tellin’ me, how I’m such a fool, / Talkin’ ‘bout how I’ll never ever find a man like you.” While the “he started it” defense may not excuse the behaviour, the context that the song provides keeps it from being simply heartless, indeed, it reveals the heart and the hurt motivating it.

And as a bit of a side note, I think that there is a difference between presenting this unpleasant idea of replaceability and actually endorsing it. Now, making such a distinction can be difficult because we tend to enjoy art, and those feelings of enjoyment can obscure critical elements. But nonetheless, the mere fact that a work of art represents something doesn’t mean that it posits that something as a good thing—much depends upon how works of art present their content by mediating it through form, and the relationship between form and content is often exhaustively complex. Sometimes there are obvious tells in the content itself—if a character does something and a work of art shows them being either punished or rewarded for it, then it can be easy to identify the presence of something like a judgement—but even then there are other formal elements (like issues of perspective) that can undercut that. This fact is part of what makes works of art so interesting and rewarding, but it also makes any pretense to final judgement very difficult.

In the case of “Irreplaceable” it is easy to overlook the problematic side of the theme of replaceability because the song is so catchy and because the power dynamic isn’t so glaring. Indeed, the catchiness and the confidence with which Beyonce delivers a line like “keep talking that mess that’s fine / But could you walk and talk at the same time” makes her power very appealing. However, for the reasons I’ve already gone over (the cheating, the emotionally-charged nature of the situation, the ex-boyfriend starting the talk about replacement) I would argue that the song isn’t a straightforward glorification of the singer’s attitude. No it certainly doesn’t give us any indication that we are meant to actually judge her harshly or negatively, but the presentation of a perhaps overly strong and harsh attitude in the face of a break up is far from a universal prescription about how to act in a relationship. There is pain not too far underneath the surface of this song that mediates its perspective, and there are certainly a lot worse ways to handle cheaters.

Glimpses of Recognition: The Mountain Goats--"Against Pollution"

Thinking about recognition in "The Ballad of Bull Ramos" got me thinking about another moment of recognition (or in this case, non-recognition and the hope of recognition) in another Mountain Goats song, "Against Pollution":

The song seems to be a confession of sorts: it tells the story of someone working in a liquor store who, when someone tries to rob the store with a gun, shoots the would-be robber in the face. The song itself seems to be an attempt to work through the experience, and in particular, to sort out whether (or more likely, to what extent) he should feel guilty for what he did. Certainly the circumstances help to justify the act as self-defense from a legal and moral sense. But even if the act was justified, even if it was the right thing to do (or at least not unequivocally wrong), it was still not a good thing to have done, even despite the fact that that the whole thing was largely out of one’s control. There are tragedies of all sorts in the world, ones where there is no good outcome, and no one escapes unscathed or as good (or morally sound or clean or pure or whatever terminology you want).

Especially given the biblical content of the song (the terminology of pollution, the praying on the rosary at the Catholic church, and the passages drawn from the bible about the last days and seeing through a glass darkly) I think this kind of guilt by association is the pollution that is at issue in the song's title, although it is ambiguous whether the title means the song is actually against the idea of pollution/guilt or if the song is rather meant to be the singer's struggle against pollution. I'm not sure if an analysis of the song can clear that up, but it certainly sheds light on what is at stake in each, and in the course of the analysis we can see how recognition functions as a certain kind of ideal in it. 
 
So to begin with the shooting incident, it is worth noticing that the song actually runs through it twice with subtle differences. This running through it multiple times makes sense as a way of trying to make sense of the whole thing--we run these types of things through our minds over and over  to try to understand them, often telling them with slight variations until we get to the point where the story becomes one we can live with, or, to put it another way, we can recognize ourselves in. This can be an ambiguous process: it may just be until we get to a version of events self-serving enough for us to live with, and sometimes it may be until see if from the right angle so that we can understand it and fit it into our sense of what the world is like--or adjust our sense of the world accordingly. This is also part of the function of confession: by telling the story to another, we submit our actions to their judgement in the hopes of being vindicated, i.e., being recognized, by them.
Here is the first telling:

When I worked down at the liquor store
A guy with a shotgun came raging through the place,
Muscled his way behind the counter,
I shot him in the face.

It's pretty factual, it simply recounts setting A, action B, and reaction C. Compare that to the second telling:

A year or so ago I worked at a liquor store
And a guy came in,
Tried to kill me,
So I shot him in the face.
I would do it again, I would do it again.

The second telling connects the incident to a specific(ish) time in the teller's life ("A year or so ago"), gives the robber a far more threatening and directed intent ("tried to kill me"), and frames his own reaction in terms of that threat, thereby justifying it ("I would do it again, I would do it again"), but perhaps even more importantly, incorporating it into the fabric of his life. 

The first telling leads to a seemingly spontaneous desire to go down to the Catholic church, where the teller spends 45 minutes praying the rosary (a penace typically given after confession, thereby making it seems like ). The repetition of the rosary is reflected in the repetition of the story, and the need for confession/absolution (one leading to the other, hopefully) is of course linked to the church. 
 
Indeed, the speaker seems to imagine absolution as a form of full and mutual recognition, which is itself an event of apocalyptic, biblical proportions: 

When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets,
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are

What is interesting is that the second "I would do it again" from the second telling then immediately transitions into this, so its hard to tell if this "I would do it again" is meant to simply be a second affirmation for emphasis, or if it is actually meant to be "I would do it again when the last days come," implying that the act is ultimately justified in the cosmic scheme of things, such as in the reckoning in Revelation 20:12, or perhaps more like what gets described in the I Corinthians 13:11 for the element of interpersonal knowledge and recognition that comes from it:

"Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away...For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (The Simon & Schuster Living Literature edition of the KJV 1146)
 
This famous passage (which the Mountain Goats also directly quote in “Love Love Love”--“love” being a synonym for “charity,” although the latter is more specific when it comes to the translation of the Greek term agape in the passage) undoubtedly lurks behind this moment of finally recognizing each other as we really are, rather than being limited by the endless stream of merely partial knowledge that normally makes up our world and our personal relations. Another related passage comes from the1^st Letter of John (3:2):

"what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1216)

The idea throughout these biblical passages is that the ultimate goal is to be able to fully recognize and love each other, and I think what the speaker wants is this recognition to exist between himself and the robber (that is who I think the “we” is in this song). Without a heaven or an end of the world this kind of recognition is ultimately unachieveable in this case (the robber is surely dead after being shot int he face), but it is easy to see how religious feelings get summoned up in an attempt to come to grips with the desire for such a resolution. It is a complicated moral situation, one in which recognition plays an ambiguous but crucial role.

Glimpses of Recognition: The Mountain Goats' "The Ballad of Bull Ramos"

The concept that I wish to pursue an examination of across a pair of Mountain Goat songs is a philosophically laden one: recognition. As the word literally says, re-cognition is not just a matter of cognition, of thinking something for the first time, but of some kind of thinking-over of something that we already know but perhaps in a higher-order or fuller fashion like when we come to recognize something as true. This sense is particularly relevant to the social meaning of the term: when we recognize someone we know from a crowd, for instance, it's not like picking one object out from a series of others, but of affirming a prior relationship based upon the knowledge (at least to an extent) of who that person is, i.e., their identity. Connected to this sense of recognition and social identity is the way that we also speak about it in terms of the attribution of some kind of status to one's identity. So when we say that we want recognition for something, what we mean is that we want some particular act or achievement, along with whatever social status they are supposed to bring, to be explicitly connected to our identity. 

The song that began my reflection on this matter is "The Ballad of Bull Ramos," which is about a wrestler who was long classified as a heel, but the song itself is a celebration of his life and spirit, as the uplifting music itself attest. 

As for the details of his life, Bull Ramos did actually buy and run a car wrecking yard, so that part is all accurate, as are his famous generosity and the bits about his later health problems. The picture is paints of him is far removed from that of the bull-whip wielding heel; instead, the energy of the song reflects the vitality that seems to have infused his life inside and out of the ring. In this regard the song is really about giving him the recognition that he deserves, a task that much of the album it comes from, Beat the Champ, is devoted to doing for wrestling in general by revealing the human content of wrestling and of the enjoyment of it.


I think the most touching part of the song--its emotional core--comes around 1:25, after he's laid up by a piece of glass on the floor of the shop:

And the doctor recognizes me
As the operating theatre grows dim,
"Aren't you that old wrestler with a bull whip?"
"Yes sir, that's me, I'm him."

All of the weight of this entire song, with its documentation of not just a career but a life, bears down on the one word, "recognizes"  and the kind of status-giving that it implies. In the case of Bull Ramos, I think there is a certain validation in being recognized by the doctor. The fact that a serious professional could have been so influenced by his performance to recognize him so many years later serves as a particular validation of his career. You can hear this in the way that Ramos addresses the doctor as sir as well as his triple affirmation of his identity ("Yes sir, that's me, I'm him"). It's a touching moment that is a testament to The Mountain Goats' songwriting ability. In the next post I'll follow up with the next Mountain Goats song, "Against Pollution." 

Musical Shipwrecks: Big Country "Ships"

Now, despite having categorized this song in terms of a “musical shipwreck,” I don’t think of this song as a shipwreck, it’s more that I find the shipwreck to be a particularly fascinating metaphor (in anything, not just songs). The magic, as it were, lies in the way that a shipwreck combines these elements and more: the terror of being in a foreign element (the sea); the anonymity of death at sea; the seemingly tragic inevitability of a ship being wrecked by external elements—as if by fate; the heroism of the crew’s endeavour to save themselves and the ship; the totality of the disaster that it represents, as it is the loss of a whole crew/community; and the sense that it signifies the ruin of a journey and the possibility of a homecoming. All in all it’s a powerful combination of elements stemming from what has long been one of the most important forms of transportation (and indeed, forms of life) in human history. All this makes it a potent metaphor for lots of other things (and a potent image in itself as well), and thus a great resource for song-writing.

That being said, let me present the song “Ships” from Big Country:

I’m going to start this one on a somewhat biographical note because it’s a song that has meant a lot to me for a long time. Although I cannot remember the exact date when I first heard this song, I would guess that it was either late in the summer of 1993 (maybe a promo play of it before the album was released) or the summer of 1994. Either way, I figure it was the summer because I heard it on the radio at my family cottage and that’s most likely when I’d have been there (could be a random part of the fall of 1993 but my fuzzy memory suggests the summer and fall trips to the cottage were infrequent). Anyway, I only heard it that one time on the radio for years before I finally tracked it down some time in the early 2000s on the basis of the super catchy folk-rock chorus—“Where were you went my ship went down….”

What I think is particularly fascinating (and affecting) about this song is how un-rock-and-roll its subjects are: the song details three lives shipwrecked on the rocks of life as it were. Now, failure isn’t foreign to rock, there are lots of losers throughout the rock catalogue (Springsteen is full of them, for instance). No, it’s the particular kind of failure detailed in the song, and the virtues that it espouses (despite their failure) that make it special.

To see what I mean let me first outline the three subjects here: the first is a “used-up” man who prides himself on his honesty and integrity and clings to whatever dignity he can; the second is a woman who tried to life a free life, trying to find love on her own terms rather than those dictated by society and who ends up alone; and the last is an “us” who are struggling to balance their ideals against the demands of mere survival. Yes rock has its rebels and idealists, but rarely on the humbler, more personal side such as this and rarely in the service of such unhip virtues as personal integrity, or for a genuine sexual/emotional freedom (as opposed to its usual commercialized form which is really just another kind of bondage). The shipwreck metaphor works here because these “ships” have charted such exemplary courses and yet despite that they still find themselves floundering against external conditions.

The fact that this song is largely about the failure of all of these people and their ideals would make it particularly depressing were it not for the rousing chorus, the one that enabled me to find the song so many years later:

So where were you when my ship went down?
Where were you when I ran aground?
Where were you when I turned it around?
Where were you when they burned me down?

The chorus is accusatory, which you would think would contribute to the general “downer” quality of the song, were it not for the infectious energy of that accusation. Sure these shipwrecks have happened and continue to happen and we are nowhere to be found, but this accusation is meant to wake us up. “Where were you?” turns into the question of “Where are you now?” and “Where are we now?” That is why the final part of the song switches to a reflection on “us,” because if we can get a sense of the course that we are on, then there is a chance to band together as a crew and prevent these shipwrecks in the future. The only hope we have is to form a “we” to stand against the “they” that burn it down.

The Posies-"You're the Beautiful One"

In the Cold War Kids song “First” from a few posts ago, one of the central parts of the song features a potential moment of redemption. In it the downward pull of psychological gravity gets arrested for a moment, written off as a “dark night of the soul”:

There comes a time, in a short life

Turn it around, get a rewrite

Call it a dark night of the soul

Ticking of clocks, gravity’s pull

First you get close, then you get worried

As the final lines quoted here suggest, this “rewrite” doesn’t really stick, and things continue to deteriorate along the old lines for the rest of the song. The notion of life’s resistance to a rewrite is what leads me to the next song that I want to discuss, “You’re the Beautiful One” by The Posies.

I’m not sure how much I can say about what “You’re the Beautiful One” means as a whole because it is rather cryptic, or at least more impressionistic and tonal than explicit in its meaning. It seems to be directed at someone going away—probably dying, probably sick from something judging from one of the last lines: “Funny how you can cure yourself / But what made you sick’s still there” (and then there’s the devastating line that follows: “Funny how you detach yourself / When you want to show you care.”).

But maybe the beauty is beyond understanding, since the final line of the song does declare that “What’s so beautiful about you is, / You didn’t have to explain it to me.” Anyway, what is clear is that much of the song proceeds by negation:

There's no kiss, no kiss I'd trade for you
There's no kiss, no disciple I wouldn't betray for you
You're the beautiful one, of course you knew
And the wind it blew smoke circles around your eyes.

I can't teach you, I can't tell you
I can't know you but I want to
I can't sense you, I can't move you
I can't kill you, I can't stop you
There's no tailor-making a four hundred dollar disguise
(not this time)
Just an unhappy wind blowin' smoke in your eyes

All of this negation points to the idea that there is no relationship that is sacred (all of the Judas kiss and disciple imagery), and no action or relationship that ever fully connects (the whole second stanza.verse). There is only this negativity, the wind that blows in our eyes, obscuring our vision while it blows everything away. And yet from within that, and maybe because of it, there is beauty; perhaps all this negation is a kind of clearing away of everything, a saying goodbye to all of the inessential to get at the essential.

In getting to the heart of this process, the most interesting of these negations is the following sequence which is focused around the inappropriateness of the metaphor of writing/fiction being applied to life:

There’s no backspace, there’s no comma,

There’s no hyphen, there’s no ribbon,

There’s no tab skips to the place where it writes out,

“All is forgiven.”

There’s no accusation that comes as a big surprise,

Not this time.

Just an unhappy tire throwing dirt in my eyes.

No backspace means no undoing what has been done; no comma means no pausing; no hyphen means no arbitrarily or forcefully or externally or easy linking two things together; no ribbon (I guess we’re back in typewriter days here) means no underlying continuity or source or background; and no tab skips to a final “All is forgiven” means that there is certainly no easy or instant resolution to be had, and perhaps no final or total resolution at all. As the part about the lack of an “accusation that comes as a big surprise” suggests, endings in life are messy and we can rarely avail ourselves of the same kinds of tropes that guide a fictional story to its end like a big reveal. And despite all of this—again, perhaps only with it, because of it—there is still beauty to be affirmed in life. And in the tradition of my treatment of “Vital Signs,” I want to include a link to a really excellent live version of this song and point out some of the highlights of it.

This version starts at 1:22, before that you get some foreign language (Dutch from the looks of it) exposition of the joke behind the title of Ken Stringfellow’s album title “Danzig in the Moonlight” and a cute little rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” The playing in the song itself is gorgeous throughout (their version from the live album Alive Before the Iceberg is also excellent, with more musical muscle backing it compared to this acoustic version), but the standout moments include Ken’s delivery of the line “Just an unhappy tire throwing dirt in my eyes” at 4:34, and the repetition of “You’re the beautiful one” starting at 5:30 and culminating in Ken’s “You’re the one” at 5:56. It’s the beautiful one.

And as a final note, The Posies are releasing a new album, Solid States, this friday (May 20th), so as far as days go that's going to be a beautiful one. From the sound of it (both the release commentary and the song samples released so far: http://www.mymusicempire.com/#/artist/theposies#artist-intro ) the album is quite a departure from what we've heard from them before, particularly because of the death of their long-time drummer Darius Minwalla. I'll be interested to see how it all goes.