Guided by Voices - "Twilight Campfighter"

"Twilight Campfighter" is the song, beyond any of the others, that really cemented Guided by Voices in my mind as something truly special. The album its from, Isolation Drills, is full of gems and hooks and the kind of sparkling, power pop sound that I love, and this track embodies that above all.

I'll start with the title, which I initially thought might be "Twilight campfire," probably because it would have made more sense at the outset. However, my mistake is a productive one, because on the level of sound the two are close, "campfighter" only adds a barely enunciated extra syllable and /t/ sound, but retains the /r/ sound of "campfire." But what it gains is reference to a person and a sense of striving and mission. The TC (twilight campfighter) is still associated with camp fires and all that goes with them: comfort, adventure, safety, vision, wisdom, and perhaps above all, something that keeps the darkness at bay.

The potential salvation described in this song isn't easy, as the second line makes clear ("You build your fires into an open wound"): if we are to be saved, the process will be painful like cauterizing a wound to kill an infection. And what an infection: the situation, as this song presents it, is indeed grim, it is one of a existence as a cog in the capitalist machine:

As we vegetate and wait around for brighter days

And can dance contented to the sound of money

These lines are pretty damning in their description of an infection that is both inner and outer: the word choice of "vegetate" evokes the passivity of a consumerist lifestyle down to the idea that life is about mindless growth and nothing else. The image of people "danc[ing] contented to the sound of money" speaks to the way that our movements through the world are carefully orchestrated from without. Our bodies (and minds) move in harmony with the system that envelops us. Even the fact that it is contentment that characterizes out dancing is damning: if we often think of dancing as a passionate and expressive act, if the highest emotion it gets is contentment then it would seem that much of our affective lives have been leveled off.

But, to further flesh out what this song has to say about the situation we are in, it is important to note that not all is dark: Pollard sings about how, "on these darker trails...to hike through dangerous weather you need twilight eyes." Ultimately it is a twilight time, in which things are murky and ambiguous and it is hard to make out distinct shapes. The upside is that this does mean that the light has not fully gone and not everything is lost, hence the tender and affecting praise of the TC's visionary "twilight eyes":

Could I have seen a sight

Much greater than your twilight eyes

That penetrate our silent lives (lies)?

Things are grim, but they are grim in a particularly murky way in which it can be hard to see just how and why they are so. That is why vision is one of the most important moral qualities. Someone who sees things as they really are--both with the world and ourselves--can help us see as well. Our lives are silent because we are not truly living them, but dancing to someone else's song, as it were (hence the sung ambiguity between "lives" and "lies," in the current state one cannot tell the difference). "Twilight eyes" can see past those illusory surfaces (and this world is made up of so many mere surfaces), to see what is really important and to help others see the same:

All for longing causes Racing minds and lengthy pauses All who must soon shed their veils And wipe their eyes.

As a final note that I suspect is entirely a matter of my own associations (although who can say for sure), the "twilight eyes" always make me think of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, specifically the figure of Tiresias in "III. The Fire Sermon." Without going too deep into it, The Waste Land is fiercely critical of the seemingly empty lives of those it portrays and as Eliot explains it, Tiresias serves the function of the blind seer who combines the experiences of both sexes, and can thus see better than everyone else:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward

The "darkness" of modernity seems fixed in the violet hour, in the murky twilight where there are no clearcut distinctions to depend upon, something perhaps even more unsettling than simple night.

Hearing things in Guided by Voices "Heavy Like the World"

Last year's great musical discovery was Guided by Voices. First of all, I will say that I am pleased to be still having "great musical discoveries," as I take that as a sign that I haven't gotten too sclerotic in my tastes. (I say "too" as I have definite limits, a friend tried to get me into Kanye, and while I could see the interest in what he does, I didn't enjoy it myself.)

Now as for Guided by Voices, I'd known about them before--a friend from grad school lent me Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes and Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department back in 2008 or so-and I enjoyed them, but delve too deeply into them. For instance, a few surface gems like "Motor Away" and "Blimps Go 90" stuck. But last summer I came across Do the Collapse and Isolation Drills, and the latter in particular got me hooked. Isolation Drills is dense with hooks, craft, and gorgeous power pop sound. Songs like "Chasing Heather Crazy" and "Brides Hit Glass" are crazy infectious, and a song like "Twilight Campfighter" is just stunningly poignant and beautiful. I also like Do the Collapse but it definitely doesn't compare.

So my interest in those albums got me looking into the rest of the (gigantic) Guided by Voices (and GbV-adjacent) catalogue. I can't say I know (or love) it all by now, but most albums have some really excellent songs (and Under the Bushes Under the Stars is the best of all, I'd argue) so that over the last 9 months I have been listening to little else (to the chagrin of those around me).

There will likely be many post about them to come, but I will begin in the relative present with a song off of 2019s presciently named Sweating the Plague. The song is "Heavy Like the World," and its got some good rock and roll chops with some really strong bass and drum throbbing under some nice guitar arpeggios. The music is effective, but of course it is above all a vehicle for the prolific output of Robert Pollard (and occasionally others--props to Tobin Sprout for some really excellent work too).

Lyrically it is like a lot of Pollard's songs: more impressionistic and suggestive than clearly articulated, defying easy explanation. But there are always some really interesting lines (and often some really funny or weird things too--I appreciate the willingness to be surreal and strange).

In honour of this, the rest of this post will be more in the vein of the impressionistic as well, as I chronicle a few of the connections that I make between this song and others as a way of showing how it fits into my emotion life. One such moment is fairly early in the song, as Pollard sings:

"If I finally want to do
the puzzle of your heart"

The image is a neat one, but there is also something in Pollard's pronunciation of "heart" here (and some of this has to do with the style of the production) that reminds me of the pronunciation of the same word in Bastille's "Laura Palmer":

The two song share an appreciation of life in the midst of darkness, though in general Bastille's music is much more straightforward and the lyrics aren't super deep, but I can't pass up any Twin Peaks related content. Plus, I really enjoy the barking dog interruption in the video--I like the way it interrupts the feel-good chorus, not allowing the audience the pleasure of repetition. Similarly, the lines

"If you had your gun,
Would you shoot it at the sky?"

are effective because they frustrate the anticipated rhyme of "gun" and "sun," even going so far as to choose another s-word connected to the heavens.

To get to the other moment I'd like to dwell upon, we move to the end of the song where the phrase "heavy like the world," associated with the burdens of loneliness that have to be borne in order to seek like, transforms into
 
"Heavy like the words on your tattoos

Put some danger in your life
And more ink in your tattoo"

Now, despite being (barely) born within the slice of time alotted to millenials, I find myself (perhaps in a self-congratulatory way) unsympathetic to many of the tendencies attributed to them. Perhaps the one that I understand and appreciate the least are my generation's rage for tattoos.

However, I don't mind the appropriation of the symbolic potential of tattoos, or of the act of tattooing. The way that pain becomes inscribed upon the body, and can do so in an intelligible and uplifting manner is something interesting, even if the end result is usually less so. Its the symbolism of tattooing that Pollard is invoking here, and I can't help but think of The Mountain Goats song "Amy AKA Spent Gladiator" from their absolutely triumphant Transcendental Youth:

The song deserves a fuller treatment than I'm going to give here, but I want to zero in on these lines, as they remind me of the GbV ones:

"People might laugh at your tattoos,
When they do get new ones 
In completely garish hues"

Written after Amy Winehouse's death, the song itself is about staying alive, and doing whatever it takes to do so. As in "Heavy Like the World," these lines capture the idea that tattooing can involve an intensification of life, potential as a means of survival.

Tattoos straddle and interesting line between the external and the internal, as the point of them is to make something internal (a feeling, a relationship, an experience, a memory, etc.) into an external sign.  They are, in a sense, for other people, but only insofar as they serve to reveal the self, so even negative attention can still be a resource for the expression of the self. And when the self is particularly pressed, that may be one of the few resources for it to develop itself. But there is a somewhat desperate emotional logic to this (and to the song as a whole), insofar as the external reaction begins to take over as the motivation for the tattoo, thereby taking the emphasis off of the "original" inner reason (the sign takes over from what it is meant to be a sign of). Perhaps the way that exteriority can become the meaning of the originally interior is part of what is "heavy like the world."