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.