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.

Rush-“Vital Signs” (Part III—Commentary Plus Alternate Versions)

Now, keeping in mind that this is long before the widespread takeover of autotune and the disgrace that it brought to the recording industry, I think that there is still going to be some resistance to thinking about our inner lives in terms of recording. The problem is that it makes it seem as if we were merely machines, that what we think of as most ourselves is merely mediated and cobbled together from a variety of external sources (those “interfaces and interchanges” and “interference” and “mixed feelings”—in particularly the sense in which we have “mixed feelings about the function and the form” being unable to come to terms with them).

But, and I think that this is what the recording studio setting in particular suggests, it doesn’t have to seem so bad if you consider that that is also how songs get made. The song that, as I’ve already discussed is the spiritual predecessor (literally) to this song, “The Spirit of Radio,” even explicitly argues the case for the role of technology in something like self-reflection in these lines: “All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted / Not so fully charted its really just a question of your honesty.”

Complicated artifacts that they are—in some cases, perhaps infinitely so—works of art have often been taken to be at least analogical to human beings because they appear to form dynamically self-contained and self-regulating wholes. Indeed, all of the processes that “Vital Signs” concerns itself with are essentially concerned with the regulation of external inputs (that is what recording is after all), so the anti-conformity metaphor is essentially an issue of how one comports oneself in relation to the outside. The persistent emphasis on mediation in the music video, the parade of images of the band putting together the many pieces of the song that is playing in the video only serves to underscore what an achievement the song is, what work went into it.

In terms of the central message of the song, that you have to “deviate from the norm,” we can think of the norm as simply taking things as they are, accepting what is as what must be and conforming to that, rather than forging one’s own reaction and one’s own path. One of the most fun lines in the song (ones which I’m sure must make Neil Peart very satisfied with his cleverness), encapsulates this very well: “An ounce of perception, a pound of obscure.” The line that it is riffing off of is “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” and the idea is that one’s own clear sight is worth far more than anything less genuine. Indeed, the general falseness of the norm means that it is more likely to obscure than illuminate. We give in to the norm perhaps because the alternative is too difficult, or one has been worn down—the lines in the chorus that go, “A tired mind become a shape shifter”—so we choose to adopt the shape of another rather one’s own because it is easier.

But again, it is important to remember that genuineness is not the same as purity or self-enclosure: mediation and mixing here represent the achievement of an identity rather than its compromise. With recording—and by extension, with life—it is not just a question of what the inputs are, but what you do with them. It is so difficult to balance the function and the form without simply giving in to the norm precisely because that means there is no set answer or formula to follow: mediate too much and form takes over and kills the life that the form is meant to serve. But let the function dominate and without the regulation of form the function cannot be properly fulfilled.

(Surely autotune would be an example of conforming to the worst kind of norm possible in the worst kind of way—certainly it could be said to demonstrates the least amount of “The Spirit of Radio”’s “honesty” were it not for the fact that so much of it is so obvious. In this regard the subtler forms of autotune are perhaps more insidious and dishonest, if perhaps less overtly obnoxious.)

This aside about autotune leads me to the last thing about this song I would like to discuss. Near the end of the song things take a dramatic change musically. At around 3:04 in the album version we get to the “Everybody got mixed feelings,” “Everybody got to deviate / elevate / escalate/ emancipate from the norm” section. The various words that Geddy sings about how we ought to relate to the norm express the variety of issues at stake here. First of all, everyone has to deviate from the norm because the norm is an artificial determination, calculated from a whole field of values, so in this regard the whole idea of "Unstable condition, a symptom of life" that this song begins with holds true (for an interested recap of where our current obsession with the idea of the norm and the average see this article). But the other phrasings Geddy uses mark a particular kind of normative determination to deviate from the norm by rising above and getting free of it. This side of it connects to Rush's general nonconformity insofar as the idea is to be guided by what really matters rather than what is reflected in some external or artificial notion like that of the norm.

And to return to the music, these ideas receive a really amazing musical exposition. The opening to this is marked by a great bass solo and a scattering of really cool bass fills in the album version while the guitar plays some great atmospheric chords against a heavenly (I don’t know the term here) synth. Coupled with the lyrics it gives the song a really triumphant and transcendent ending. But as great it is on the album the live versions are immensely superior. Gems like the versions of the song from the 1984 “Grace Under Pressure” tour and the 2002 “Vapor Trails” tour (the song was actually recorded in Quebec but its bundled with “Rush in Rio”), are one of the reasons why I think Rush sells so many live records. Their album versions are fantastic and enormously difficult on their own, but the band pulls them off beautifully live (the many versions of “Bravado” are worth checking out).

Anyway, these live versions of “Vital Signs” really shine in this final section. Here is the “Grace Under Pressure” version:

The final section begins around 3:10, and certainly Geddy shows off his bass chops there. But what’s really special to me are the great guitar fills that Alex inserts everywhere. You can hear him start layering the notes at 3:22, and he continues to do some really beautiful playing through 3:46 in particular. Meanwhile, Geddy’s voice is, as some of the commenters on the video note, really in fine form—not quite as high as it is in the 70s but still very strong.

But as much as I like that version, the “Vapor Trails”/ “Rush in Rio” version is the definitive one to me. Now, I’ve had to link to a recording of the entire “Rush in Rio” album because the cut of just the song isn’t on Youtube, but it’s just a matter of finding the song at the very end, starting at 2:55:08

The sound of this “Vital Signs” is really robust—when Geddy sings “Leave out the fiction. / The fact is this friction / Will only be worn by persistence. / Leave out conditions. / Courageous convictions / Will drag this dream into existence,” you can hear the will behind it. But what really shines is the final section of the song, beginning at 2:58:18. First of all, I love Geddy’s exclamation of “Hoo ha” there, I always mentally insert it into every other version of the song that I hear. But again, what really shines is the guitar work starting at 2:58:35. I just love it. Listen and maybe you can make an ounce of perception out of the pound of obscure I’m serving up here.