and here are the lyrics (as near as I can make them out):
(Many whoas)
A bad sign
It wasn’t overnight
Wait kids in the clubs
Won’t even touch this stuff
It’s a hard sell
Act not, heaven act not
Stay your hand
‘Cause I can recall telling you how I feel the hurt,
It was so real
A batsuit won’t protect me from you boys
You should have come to me first
Who’s going to help you now
Shittalkers,
Who’s going to help paint your skies?
All the unpaid beauty thieves
(Chorus) Back when you started there was envy all around
You and your sedative sides became so acquainted
Paranoia’s antiquated
I was into you ‘cause you were so understudied
Take it all back ‘cause I don’t want your blood money
You were into me for the last time
I got news for this town,
All you shittalkers,
Unlicensed dog walkers,
Rip out taxidermy heart stalkers
You can take it all up the Wabash
And put away the (?) Pope,
Don’t even smile, anymore
You only do it ‘cause your bored
Shittalkers, I’ll be somewhere else
Doing what I always did
Keeping the streets safe
From American kids
Chorus
You were into me for the last time
Oh but innocence it never was a good game
Sooner or later you’ll flicker in the eyes of fame
Immolation’s absolute
You can’t say what you said and give up the cutest eyes
Defamation’s obsolete
Take it all back what you said now,
Take it back
You went behind my back for the very last time
The obliqueness of some of the lyrics aside (a Stringfellow standard-I love the wordplay in the final verse, the flicker flame/fame switch, the immolation/defamation absolute/obsolete play), the song itself is a pretty straightforward denunciation of shittalkers, i.e., people who talk shit about other people behind their backs, and a dramatization of the kind of hurt outrage that such behaviour can cause. Given the nature of the subject matter, I think that the rather exaggerated and outrageous nature of the song (the dramatic shifts in tempo, the overstatements, the strong emotional delivery) fits really well. This kind of situation lends itself to drama as emotions run high and things get blown out of proportion, and I think the way that the song stridently embodies this makes it really fun.
Why focus on the dramatic nature of the song? Well, I guess at least one online critic wasn’t a big fan of Danzig in the Moonlight (he also slags The Posies in general in a release notice for an earlier album, Blood/Candy, saying that they were the most boring thing to come out of Seattle in the 90s—as someone who never cared much for Nirvana and who puts The Posies in his top 3, my tastes definitely differ.) Anyway, if you check out the review you’ll see he says that “Stringfellow has a tendency to get melodramatic with his tunes” and singles out the “overly-dramatic ‘Shittalkers’” in particular. So, the interesting thing about that is that either Ken Stringfellow or someone claiming to be him fired back in the comment section with a long scathing review of the original review. That whole exchange was entertaining, even as it degenerated into name-calling (no one really covered themselves in glory), given the fact that one of the inciting elements was a song called “Shittalkers!”
That whole exchange got me thinking about drama in songs, particularly the way that singers capture some of the more rarely expressed affects. There are lots of songs about heartbreak and yearning, and there are even lots of angry and rebellious songs, but the kind of righteous outrage coming from a place of hurt and vulnerability like we hear in “Shittalkers!” seems fairly rare. The breakout line in this regard is definitely “I’ve got news for this town” (and the diatribe that follows it) which is probably what the Snob reviewer was probably reacting against. It’s over-the-top and exaggerated, but I’m not sure that is the same thing as inauthentic, nor am I so sure that they are bad things. Maybe its the same thing as the way that people tend to dismiss romance and the sentimental as bad art because they have a notion of art as being something only concerned with the serious and noble and tragic, while that seems like such a crime to me insofar as it cuts out a huge and important range of human experience worthy of representation and regard precisely because it is how we are at our lowest. Not all hurt has to be mournful and dirgelike and respectable, nor disguised as invincible anger and cloaked in aggression; there is room for the exploration of the entire, messy range of emotions.
So that gets me thinking about another song (and, indeed, band) that you could call melodramatic to its core, and better for it: The Mountain Goats’ “Heel Turn 2.” This song is from the Beat the Champ album, which is all about wrestling, so the question of what counts as melodrama is already at issue. As many others have already pointed out, The Mountain Goats do a good job of adhering to their subject (wrestling) while revealing the larger, human significance of it. As the title suggests, “Heel Turn 2” is about a good guy (a “face”) who finds the pressure of maintaining that course too much and turns bad (turns into a “heel”). It’s a melodramatic concept, good guy goes bad, but the way that the song humanizes that decision and really works to inhabit its emotional space transforms it into something totally different from mere melodrama.
In terms of emotion, Darnielle (the main Mountain Goat) puts a lot of emotion into the song throughout (not unusual for him and not a bad thing at all—I remember a particularly great YouTube comment from a live performance of “DamnThese Vampires,” which reads “the intensity of johns stage presence can power a small town”--you rock Hilary Tong) but the crowning moment of "Heel Turn 2" is the line that starts at about 1:12: “You found my breaking point, congratulations.” The bitter sarcasm of that “congratulations” is stunning and raw. and perfect as what it is.
Now, I would say that this song, and this moment in particular, both is and is not melodramatic. I will try to explain what I mean: it is melodramatic in that there is nothing subtle or artfully tempered about it, the emotion is all right there on display and the music takes a back seat to it, but at the same time I don’t see it carrying all of the negative things that go along with melodrama—the falseness of the emotion, the sense that it isn’t earned. I think part of the problem is just that it is an unusual emotion (bitter defeat) to find in a popular song, so we don’t have the same familiarity with it and guidelines for dealing with it as we might with some more common ones like pining after an unobtainable love or something like that. I think the other part of the problem is the more general issue that I raised above, namely, the sense that serious art has to mediate and sublimate emotion, to rein it in with artifice. While I agree that some very great art does just this, I also think that there is room for art to put its resources to other effects, such as presenting and evoking strong emotions, even of a negative sort. Indeed, for strong reactions that have a powerfully dramatic element like the outrage of “Shittalkers!,” I’m not sure if any work that tried to tamp that down would really be very effective in capturing that emotion.
And to the people who might say that such emotions don’t need to be represented, well, art has so many roles and functions that I’m not sure there’s any basis for that position. Consider the what people have to say about their use of The Mountain Goats’ music as a kind of salve in this piece from the Toast, that’s just one role that music can play. Beyond helping people comes to terms with their own feelings and experiences, music’s objectification of emotion is important in a larger sense by providing the means by which we can come to understand the emotional landscape of human life in general. The “melodramatic” may not always be pleasant, since it is so often bound up with failure and loss and hurt, but that makes them no less worthy of treatment and understanding--and perhaps even more so, since it is precisely at such dark points in our lives that we are most in need of understanding.
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