I could easily keep posting Guided by Voices content (and to a certain extent I will), but I will do something at least a little different and look at Ken Stringfellow's (one half of The Posies) song "110 or 220V," another song (like "Shittalkers," which I covered earlier) off of Danzig in the Moonlight. Here's the song
I could never know you
And I never really want to
Is what love says to me
Pull some faces from a jar
And spread 'em on your outline
Until you have ceased to be
Reality is subject to cancellation
But whoever said I would be free
I created myself and volunteered
for the confederacy
I lost all the faith I had at the battle of New Orleans
Our country died, drowned in its sleep
Everybody thinks they are a lover and a fighter
A kind of spaceship hero
Well I was still leaning on that lie
And if they caught me again they'd sentence me so I could never die
But now the deals have all been struck
The prizes, they're all claimed up
There's nothing left worth staking
Put your hands into the darkness
And drive from your psyche
The model of modern efficiency
At 110 or 220V
I hope there's still something you still want to see in me
So, first of all, I've got to mention how gorgeous the harmonica is: its plaintive wail gets me every time. And it sets the tone for a pretty bleak opening: the initial lines are ambiguous, its not clear whether the grim picture that is "what love says to me" is a message that has delivered to the speaker through experience, or whether it is what that word/concept says to him. But either way it marks this song as one of loss and weariness. The song runs through these experiences, occupying what seems to be a series of historically dislocated positions.
The second stanza gets even deeper into the sense of dislocation by developing an image straight out of The Beatles' depressive tour de force: "Eleanor Rigby" (she who "keeps her face in a jar by the door"):
Pull some faces from a jar
And spread 'em on your outline
Until you have ceased to be
The face, rather than being the seat of personal identity, conceals and ultimately obliterates identity. At least for Rigby there is still just one face, the public face that she presents to the world, presumably a positive one that hides the lonely and impoverished reality of her life.
In "110 or 220V" the situation seems even more extreme: there is no longer just a single face, but a jar full of them (and they are generically just "some faces," not even Rigby's "her face"), and like jam they get spread all over. What they cover is equally vague and empty, only "your outline." This whole situation reminds me of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," where Eliot declares that "there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." This vision of the social world treats it as a realm of pure externality: faces meeting other faces while the people behind them never meet.
There are no guarantees to life or to experience, nothing propping them up, hence Stringfellow's play on the contractual terminology of reality being "subject to cancellation." I am not sure what to make about the part about the confederacy and the battle of New Orleans. I assume the latter is a reference to the battle in the American Civil War, not the War of 1812, but it's hard to say why this is THE detail in the song. Does the South stand for the last romantic vestige of the pre-modern, a time when we could create ourselves and determine our own lives? The lines that follow about the heroic (though also false) ideal of the spaceship suggest that there is some kind of historical contrast being developed here and that something has been lost: our faces, instead of being self-created, are mass produced and sipped in jars?
Certainly the final lines of the song bolster the idea that despite whatever illumination/ enlightenment may accompany modernity, there is a darkness that continues to linger, and above all, there is still the desire to be loved for oneself, whoever that self may be:
Put your hands into the darkness
And drive from your psyche
The model of modern efficiency
At 110 or 220V
I hope there's still something you still want to see in me
