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."

Music and Melodrama: Ken Stringfellow’s “Shittalkers!” and The Mountain Goats “Heel Turn 2”

Recently I’ve been listening to Ken Stringfellow’s (one major half of The Posies) latest solo album, Danzig in the Moonlight. It’s not exactly a new album (2012) but I only bought it early in the last year, and I hadn’t even listened to it much until recently since I bought it at the same time as I bought the new The Posies album (Solid States) and that album quickly consumed my attention. Anyway, I’ve been listening to it and I’ve zeroed in on one song in particular, “Shittalkers!” Here it is

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.

Glimpses of Recognition: The Mountain Goats--"Against Pollution"

Thinking about recognition in "The Ballad of Bull Ramos" got me thinking about another moment of recognition (or in this case, non-recognition and the hope of recognition) in another Mountain Goats song, "Against Pollution":

The song seems to be a confession of sorts: it tells the story of someone working in a liquor store who, when someone tries to rob the store with a gun, shoots the would-be robber in the face. The song itself seems to be an attempt to work through the experience, and in particular, to sort out whether (or more likely, to what extent) he should feel guilty for what he did. Certainly the circumstances help to justify the act as self-defense from a legal and moral sense. But even if the act was justified, even if it was the right thing to do (or at least not unequivocally wrong), it was still not a good thing to have done, even despite the fact that that the whole thing was largely out of one’s control. There are tragedies of all sorts in the world, ones where there is no good outcome, and no one escapes unscathed or as good (or morally sound or clean or pure or whatever terminology you want).

Especially given the biblical content of the song (the terminology of pollution, the praying on the rosary at the Catholic church, and the passages drawn from the bible about the last days and seeing through a glass darkly) I think this kind of guilt by association is the pollution that is at issue in the song's title, although it is ambiguous whether the title means the song is actually against the idea of pollution/guilt or if the song is rather meant to be the singer's struggle against pollution. I'm not sure if an analysis of the song can clear that up, but it certainly sheds light on what is at stake in each, and in the course of the analysis we can see how recognition functions as a certain kind of ideal in it. 
 
So to begin with the shooting incident, it is worth noticing that the song actually runs through it twice with subtle differences. This running through it multiple times makes sense as a way of trying to make sense of the whole thing--we run these types of things through our minds over and over  to try to understand them, often telling them with slight variations until we get to the point where the story becomes one we can live with, or, to put it another way, we can recognize ourselves in. This can be an ambiguous process: it may just be until we get to a version of events self-serving enough for us to live with, and sometimes it may be until see if from the right angle so that we can understand it and fit it into our sense of what the world is like--or adjust our sense of the world accordingly. This is also part of the function of confession: by telling the story to another, we submit our actions to their judgement in the hopes of being vindicated, i.e., being recognized, by them.
Here is the first telling:

When I worked down at the liquor store
A guy with a shotgun came raging through the place,
Muscled his way behind the counter,
I shot him in the face.

It's pretty factual, it simply recounts setting A, action B, and reaction C. Compare that to the second telling:

A year or so ago I worked at a liquor store
And a guy came in,
Tried to kill me,
So I shot him in the face.
I would do it again, I would do it again.

The second telling connects the incident to a specific(ish) time in the teller's life ("A year or so ago"), gives the robber a far more threatening and directed intent ("tried to kill me"), and frames his own reaction in terms of that threat, thereby justifying it ("I would do it again, I would do it again"), but perhaps even more importantly, incorporating it into the fabric of his life. 

The first telling leads to a seemingly spontaneous desire to go down to the Catholic church, where the teller spends 45 minutes praying the rosary (a penace typically given after confession, thereby making it seems like ). The repetition of the rosary is reflected in the repetition of the story, and the need for confession/absolution (one leading to the other, hopefully) is of course linked to the church. 
 
Indeed, the speaker seems to imagine absolution as a form of full and mutual recognition, which is itself an event of apocalyptic, biblical proportions: 

When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets,
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are

What is interesting is that the second "I would do it again" from the second telling then immediately transitions into this, so its hard to tell if this "I would do it again" is meant to simply be a second affirmation for emphasis, or if it is actually meant to be "I would do it again when the last days come," implying that the act is ultimately justified in the cosmic scheme of things, such as in the reckoning in Revelation 20:12, or perhaps more like what gets described in the I Corinthians 13:11 for the element of interpersonal knowledge and recognition that comes from it:

"Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away...For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (The Simon & Schuster Living Literature edition of the KJV 1146)
 
This famous passage (which the Mountain Goats also directly quote in “Love Love Love”--“love” being a synonym for “charity,” although the latter is more specific when it comes to the translation of the Greek term agape in the passage) undoubtedly lurks behind this moment of finally recognizing each other as we really are, rather than being limited by the endless stream of merely partial knowledge that normally makes up our world and our personal relations. Another related passage comes from the1^st Letter of John (3:2):

"what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore the world knoweth us not because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. But we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1216)

The idea throughout these biblical passages is that the ultimate goal is to be able to fully recognize and love each other, and I think what the speaker wants is this recognition to exist between himself and the robber (that is who I think the “we” is in this song). Without a heaven or an end of the world this kind of recognition is ultimately unachieveable in this case (the robber is surely dead after being shot int he face), but it is easy to see how religious feelings get summoned up in an attempt to come to grips with the desire for such a resolution. It is a complicated moral situation, one in which recognition plays an ambiguous but crucial role.

Glimpses of Recognition: The Mountain Goats' "The Ballad of Bull Ramos"

The concept that I wish to pursue an examination of across a pair of Mountain Goat songs is a philosophically laden one: recognition. As the word literally says, re-cognition is not just a matter of cognition, of thinking something for the first time, but of some kind of thinking-over of something that we already know but perhaps in a higher-order or fuller fashion like when we come to recognize something as true. This sense is particularly relevant to the social meaning of the term: when we recognize someone we know from a crowd, for instance, it's not like picking one object out from a series of others, but of affirming a prior relationship based upon the knowledge (at least to an extent) of who that person is, i.e., their identity. Connected to this sense of recognition and social identity is the way that we also speak about it in terms of the attribution of some kind of status to one's identity. So when we say that we want recognition for something, what we mean is that we want some particular act or achievement, along with whatever social status they are supposed to bring, to be explicitly connected to our identity. 

The song that began my reflection on this matter is "The Ballad of Bull Ramos," which is about a wrestler who was long classified as a heel, but the song itself is a celebration of his life and spirit, as the uplifting music itself attest. 

As for the details of his life, Bull Ramos did actually buy and run a car wrecking yard, so that part is all accurate, as are his famous generosity and the bits about his later health problems. The picture is paints of him is far removed from that of the bull-whip wielding heel; instead, the energy of the song reflects the vitality that seems to have infused his life inside and out of the ring. In this regard the song is really about giving him the recognition that he deserves, a task that much of the album it comes from, Beat the Champ, is devoted to doing for wrestling in general by revealing the human content of wrestling and of the enjoyment of it.


I think the most touching part of the song--its emotional core--comes around 1:25, after he's laid up by a piece of glass on the floor of the shop:

And the doctor recognizes me
As the operating theatre grows dim,
"Aren't you that old wrestler with a bull whip?"
"Yes sir, that's me, I'm him."

All of the weight of this entire song, with its documentation of not just a career but a life, bears down on the one word, "recognizes"  and the kind of status-giving that it implies. In the case of Bull Ramos, I think there is a certain validation in being recognized by the doctor. The fact that a serious professional could have been so influenced by his performance to recognize him so many years later serves as a particular validation of his career. You can hear this in the way that Ramos addresses the doctor as sir as well as his triple affirmation of his identity ("Yes sir, that's me, I'm him"). It's a touching moment that is a testament to The Mountain Goats' songwriting ability. In the next post I'll follow up with the next Mountain Goats song, "Against Pollution."