The Mountains Goats - "The Birth of Serpents"

Anyway, to finally get back to The Mountain Goats, the song I’d like to discuss first is the one that, if it didn’t exactly serve as a gateway to them, it was at least the first of theirs that really got under my skin and earned my devotion: “The Birth of Serpents.” 

I’ve linked the David Letterman version because it’s really awesome (the live performances I’ve seen on YouTube are pretty electrifying, Darnielle, the lead Goat, really inhabits them emotionally). So, speaking of getting under the skin, the first thing that struck my about this song was this stand-out line about halfway through the song: “See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest.” There is a lot to unpack about this line alone, not only in itself but also in how it connects to the rest of the song.

To begin with, the line itself is a psychologically astute description of a certain kind of (somewhat self-inflicted) misery. There are a variety of ways that someone can be at odds with themselves in this way. Drug abuse is a particularly relevant example, esp. considering that the content of practically an entire Mountain Goats album, “We Shall All be Healed,” is drawn from Darnielle’s experiences as a meth user. Anyway, the kind of damage that drug use can inflict on one’s body (along with the damage that comes of the accompanying lifestyle) certainly resembles the careless destruction (or at best neglect) of an uninvited guest. But being at odds with oneself is not limited to drug abuse, I have certainly seen people who are not comfortable with their bodies in all sorts of ways: those with self-esteem or self-image problems; those who are uncomfortable with the bodily or the sexual, often for religiously-derived reasons; and those who, for whatever reason, have never developed their physical capabilities but then are called upon to use them (I can recall having to help teach a fourteen year-old boy who styled himself a cultured aesthete how to run—something that is difficult to teach precisely because the details of learning it lurk so far back in most of our histories).

The very title of the song does offer hope: insofar as the song is about the “birth of serpents,” there is the possibility of shedding one’s skin, growing out of one’s problems, being reborn or regenerated. At first sight the image of shedding one’s skin doesn’t make sense here: surely the solution to “dwelling inside one’s body like an uninvited guest” is to learn to properly dwell within one’s body, so that the fault lies with oneself, not with the body. However, particularly if drugs are involved, the opposite may also be true. The degree to which drug addiction is a physical force and operates on a physiological level, means that to a certain extent it could be said that the fault could very well lie with the body, that one’s body might no longer be hospitable and that we can only dwell within it as a uninvited guest. In this case, the therapeutic possibilities of shedding one’s skin, i.e., cleansing or detoxing the body, are clear. (Of course, you could simply say that what you have to shed in this case is simply one’s way of life or something like that, and you wouldn’t be wrong to say so, but what I think that explanation misses is the extent to which a very bodily form of self-relation is at stake here.)

Anyway, the interesting this how the song proposes this detox as a literal form of shedding one’s skin by getting outside of oneself. Consider the first two verses of the song, which are about self-reflection in the form of reflecting on one’s (literally) external image by way of photography:

Let the camera pull back till the fullness of the frame is clear 

and plain

Peer into the screen until you see it all

Like a vision in a crystal ball

Let it all fill with smoke

Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?

The very first line introduces the camera as a tool that brings things and their context (their frame) into focus. The last line about it being a joke points to the kind of defensiveness and disbelief that meets such a process at the outset (and thereby points to the need for such a process). The objectivity of photography promises a picture of how things are that is not clouded by the vagaries of a biased (and potentially drug-addled) memory. The song dwells on the process of developing a picture—of exposing it—as a process of being exposed to the truth about oneself:

Let the fixer work until the silver’s washed away

And take the picture from the tray

Look hard at what you see and then remember you and me

And let the truth spring free

Like a jack in a box

Like a hundred thousand cuckoo-clocks

The lesson in this seems to be that one actually has to shed one’s skin in order to properly inhabit it, or to put in an amusingly paradoxical way, sometimes in order to become who we want to be we have to stop being ourselves. Self-reflection sometimes requires self-estrangement, which is the triumph recorded in the following lines:

Let the camera do its dirty work down there in the dark

Sink low, rise high, and bring some blurry pictures to remember all your darker moments by.

A Return?

It has been a long time since I have written here. For those who know me personally the reasons are no doubt obvious—hundreds of pages of dissertation (only some of which actually made it into the final draft) needed to come first. But I want to keep writing, to keep practicing my writing, and to practice keeping on writing, so this is an outlet I would do well to take advantage of to keep up that practice up when other avenues are not so fruitful.

While I have a line-up of topics I had already begun writing about before my long hiatus, I think a return to this forum needs something new—something that inspired me a great deal while I was absent from this space. That something is the band The Mountain Goats, who I will write at least a little about here and probably a great deal more in the time to come (if it comes).

But before that, another (long) preliminary: I should like to talk a little about why I think and write about music in such a long, drawn-out, and overly intellectual way. I’m not sure when it began, but for as long as I can remember I have always cared about musical lyrics and the meanings of songs. I listen to a song well enough that I try to interpret it like a poem—to be able to say what it is about, but also to be able to comment on what it is about is all about. Thinking about how The Posies’ “Please Return It” is about the inevitable vulnerability that goes along with all human relations, is to also think about the extent to which that is true, to gauge the accuracy and scope of that idea as it occurs in the song and in life, and to try to understand what particular spin and particular pathos the song brings to these recognitions. I enjoy exploring this side of music—indeed, to me this kind of understanding is entirely bound up with my enjoyment of not just music but virtually all art. 

I guess this makes me an inveterate intellectualizer, but the thing about art is that when it is successful it goes beyond mere intellectualization, that’s the point of making a work of art rather than an essay or treatise. And I don’t really mean to disparage intellectualization, as I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it as such (and tend to engage in it myself), it’s just that it can be in danger of becoming abstract or arid without something to liven it up. This kind of position is also part of what makes me an inveterate Hegelian and makes this a blog about the speculative content of music, because it is, I think, reaching after a form of reason that is a more thoroughly holistic form of thought which is the hallmark of the “speculative” for Hegel.

From Blondie's "Dreaming" to The Posies "Dream All Day" (Part One)

This spring (2012, but I've let this post languish) I got the box-set of B-sides, demos, and rarities from The Posies called "At Least, At Last" (and I also found a huge cache of live recordings as well), so I've had a pretty Posies-happy summer. The song called "Pay You Back in Time" that I wrote about earlier is one of the notable finds in that boxed-set. The subject matter of that song, particularly the issue of thinking about human relations in terms of debt, paying back, and returning, connected it "Please Return It," which was recorded around the same time. Not unlike that pairing, there is another song in "At Least, At Last" that connects up to The Posies released material in an interesting way. In this case it is a pretty straight cover of Blondie's "Dreaming":

With the exception of the change of a few pronouns to make the singer male, as I said The Posies play a pretty straight cover of the song. That's not surprising since the original is pretty rockin' with a great melody with some background harmonies sprinkled throughout it, so it's right up their alley anyway. You can definitely see how Blondie's successful navigation of the territory in-between punk, new wave, rock, and pop in the seventies and eighties, would be formative for The Posies development. Just as interesting, however, are the thematic similarities between "Dreaming" and one of The Posies' own songs (indeed, one of their most well-known, although that's not really saying much for them, unfortunately): "Dream All Day." As you might suspect from the title, Blondie's "Dreaming" celebrates the power of dreaming and the imagination over reality. We can get a sense of the power, and particularly the freedom, involved in dreaming with some of the first lines of the song:

You asked me what's my pleasure
A movie or a measure?
I'll have a cup of tea and tell you of my dreaming
Dreaming is free. 

In rejecting either a movie or music, the singer is rejecting the need to rely upon the imaginations of others for her pleasure. The self-sufficiency of the imagination is a big part of the song, and the oft-repeated line about how "Dreaming is free" best expresses this. Unlike the products of other people's imaginations, there is no price-tag attached to imagining, which means that it is quite literally free. Dreaming is free in another related sense as well: the fact that it doesn't cost anything means that it represents freedom from financial constraints. And lastly, dreaming is free in the sense that it is not limited to what actually exists or could exist: one is free to imagine all sorts of things that don't and couldn't exist.

These aspects of dreaming can make it much more attractive than reality, something that the singer in "Dreaming" admits quite readily:

I don't want to live on charity
Pleasure's real or is it fantasy?
Reel to reel is living verite,
People stop and stare at me
We just walk on by,
We just keep on dreaming

Despite the fact that fantasy is not real in the traditional sense (i.e., it is not a "thing"), the pleasure that one can get from it is very real--although the fact that this is posed as a question does complicate the issue. Nonetheless, the play on words between what is "real" and what is simply on the "reel," and how the latter could seem more real than the former, further develops this idea. Then the latter half of the verse points towards the consequences of this stance. In particular, excessive dreaming can easily lead to being isolated from the rest of the world.

Of course, the "we" in this verse and the earlier verses suggests that two dreamers can keep each other company, that is, until we get to the last verse, which makes even that relation to another person potentially nothing more than a fantasy:

Meet meet, meet me at the turnstile
I never met him, I'll never forget him
Imagine something of your very own
Something you can have and hold

The "I never met him, I'll never forget him" suggests that the whole song may have been nothing more than an instance of dreaming, suggesting that its freedom might come with a price after all.

Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #3: Ace of Base--"All That She Wants"

While I can only speak from my limited experience in this case, when someone mentions "unintended pregnancies" I think of them as typically being unintended by both partners. However, as Heart's "All I Wanna Do (Is Make Love to You)" has clearly shown, it is possible for the pregnancy to be intended by one half but not the other (although the roadside hunk in Heart's song is hardly blameless here since he clearly didn't use any protection that night--so many times, so easily, no less). We have a similar case with Ace of Base's "All That She Wants," although the motivation here is quite a bit different than in Heart's case:

In "All That She Wants" the song is quite literally about a woman who goes out and has sex with guys in order to get pregnant. Now, some have claimed that when the chorus goes "All that she wants is another baby," it only means that she wants is another lover (someone to call "baby") since the opening does say that "She leads a lonely life," but I don't think that meaning holds up as well as the unintended pregnancy one. She is clearly dedicated to one-night stands, as the lines "She's gone tomorrow boy" and "It's a night of passion / But the morning means goodbye," make clear. However, the whole predatory angle that the song goes for--"She's going to get you" and "She's a hunter you're the fox"--suggests something more "sinister" is going on here.
 
The explanation that she wants to get pregnant works with the one-night stand angle, her loneliness, and the whole "She's going to get you" aspect of the song. Not only would having children (in her mind at least) help with her loneliness, but the song suggests a financial motive as well. At the beginning of the song she has woken up "late in the morning" and her first thought is "Oh what a morning, / It's not a day for work / It's a day for catching tan." These are not the signs of someone especially committed to working for a living (and I've seen the sign, and it opened up my mind), so we can assume that another baby will provide her with material as well as emotional comfort.

While I can't say that sounds like her life is going to get any less lonely any time soon (especially since if its another baby then she already has at least one), I guess she's in pretty good spirits on this particular sunny morning, so more power to the cheeriness of this song about unintended pregnancies!

Just watch out, she going to get you...either that or the sheer catchiness of Ace of Base will.

Musical Mathematics Update (XTC/Flaming Lips/Fleet Foxes)

I am reading Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution and I came across this quote from Durkheim that really captures what I see going on in the ritualistic/animalistic  moments of XTC's "Sacrificial Bonfire" and the video for the Fleet Foxes' "The Shrine/The Argument":

Commencing at nightfall, all sorts of processions, dances and songs had taken place by torchlight; the general effervescence was constantly increasing...One ca readily see how, when arrived at this state of exaltation, a man does not recognize himself any longer. Feeling himself dominated and carried away by some sort of an external power which makes him think and act different than in normal times, he naturally has the impression of being himself no longer. It seems to him that he has become a new being: the decorations he puts on and the masks that cover his face figure materially in this interior transformation, and to a still greater extent, they aid in determining its nature. And as at the same time all his companions feel themselves transformed in the same way and express this sentiment by their cries, their gestures and their general attitude, everything is just as though he really were transported into a special world, entirely different from the one where he ordinarily lives, and into an environment filled with exceptionally intense forces that take hold of him and metamorphose him. (Quoted in Bellah, 17-18)

I think these songs are trying to recall this kind of transformative experience, and the animal costumes and symbolism capture some of what that transformation is supposed to be about: being transformed into a being closer to the natural world and to the powerful energies that still run through it underneath our civilized veneer.

Form and Content: "Your Silent Face" by New Order

In the article "What Isn't for Sale?" in The Atlantic (which also takes excellent book form as What Money Can't Buy where the argument is expanded further), Michael J Sandel address the increasing encroachment of market values into every aspect of life. While he makes a number of worthwhile points, I was particularly interested in how he framed his longer, second answer to the question, "Why worry that we are moving toward a society in which everything is up for sale?" Sandel wants to make a claim about the "corrosive tendency of markets." In particular, he asserts, "Putting a price on the good things in life can corrupt them. That’s because markets don’t only allocate goods; they express and promote certain attitudes toward the goods being exchanged."

What I find particularly resonant in his response is one of the mistakes he identifies in the thinking of people who tend to ignore this "corrosive tendency" when they urge market solutions for any and all organizational problems. Sandel writes, "Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not affect the goods being exchanged. But this is untrue. Markets leave their mark. Sometimes, market values crowd out nonmarket values worth caring about." The underlying assumption governing the thoughts of these economists is essentially that there is no necessary relation between form and content, when it should be clear that the form of our approach to an issue (treating it purely in terms of economics, for instance) inherently affects every part of the process. This is, in a sense, the same thing being expressed by the saying, "When all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."

Of course, this particular problem of the separability of form and content is as old the the dichotomy between them itself. In can easily be traced back at least as far as classical Greek philosophy: after all, we don't talk about the transcendent realm of Platonic forms--eidos--as separate from their instantiations in any particular content for nothing. (Of course, the basis for that dichotomy likely greatly predates the Greeks, and probably has a tremendously complicated religious lineage, since it was still essentially religious for them even after they explicitly conceptualized it.)

The general problem with these two concepts seems to me to be that people confuse the fact that we can provisionally distinguish between them with the idea that they are fully separable from each other in any meaningful fashion. Their relation is a good examples of the dialectical movement of concepts, as any rigorous attempt to deal with one leads necessarily to a consideration of the other as well (I have to specify "rigorous" here because, along with Hegel, I do recognize that the majority of the concepts that we employ in ordinary life are abstract and one-sided--see his delightfully playful piece "Who Thinks Abstractly" for an example of this--even though closer attention to even our ordinary reveals their unintended complexity, a fact that drove many a Platonic dialogue as well).


Now, Sandel's particular criticisms and these philosophical issues of form and content are interesting all by themselves, but because everything is better with music here is New Order's "Your Silent Face," which also deals with these themes:




The very first verse captures the inextricable relation between form and content and the futility of any conception of either apart from the other:

"A thought that never changes
Remains a stupid lie
It's never been quite the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement, no colors
Just silence."

A thought that never changes is a stupid lie precisely because it never changes, because if it stays the same it is not truly being thought. Thinking is an act, it is something that we do and is a dynamic process bound up with the rest of our life. That includes our relations with others (who we hear or who are to hear us), our own physical and emotional state (breathing), the effects of time and distance as well as the need for thought to develop or be expressed (movement), and even confront the variety and complexity of the material world (colors).

If the content of a thought stays the same then it does not deserve the status of a thought as such, instead it is a dogma, a fact (and likely quite narrowly conceived),  or something similar. It is stupid because it is not thinking, not using one's own intelligence; it is a lie because it is being untrue to the world and to experience, both of which are far more dynamic than can be captured by a "thought that never changes." Indeed, such an attitude is indicative of a pretty grim way of living, as we see expressed in a line shortly after: "We asked you what you'd seen, / You said you didn't care." Only if you don't really care about the whole, wide, incredible world outside of you could you really embrace such an attitude, and maybe then you would have a "silent face," one unreadable to others, giving and asking nothing.

Indeed, this kind of emptiness is the focus of the second major verse in the song:

"Sound formed in a vacuum
May seem a waste of time
It's always been just the same
No hearing or breathing
No movement no lyrics
Just nothing."

This verse reiterates much of the same perspective as the first, emphasizing that a content (sound) without a form (in a vacuum) is, for all intents and purposes, just nothing. If a thought is not somehow expressed or embodied, i.e., if no one hears it, no one says it, no sound waves move, and no meaning is put across, then it is totally fruitless. Even if it prevents the thought/sound from staying the same, prevents it from staying pure, expression is necessary.

Of course, it might seem hypocritical of me to have spent so much time discussing the meaning of this song in terms of one very particular form of content (the lyrics) without addressing its form, and there is a certain validity to that criticism. However, my point here has not been that we can never differentiate between form and content, only that no final and complete differentiation is possible. The extreme nature of the examples in "Your Silent Face"--a thought that never changes, a sound in a vacuum--suggests that it too is primarily directed at the absolute separation of form and content. But none of that means that we can't devote our time to mostly one or the other, after all, to demand that we always and everywhere deal with both it to fall into another kind of unreasonable demand for absoluteness and completeness.

Yet at the same time, I think it is worthwhile to at least briefly mention the form of this song as it is certainly relevant here. This is because this song could be said to serve as a kind of self-explanation for New Order, particular in terms of their embrace of electronica. Because of the precision of electronic beats and programmed synthesizers parts of New Order's music might seem to be devoted to the ideal of "sameness," and indeed the beginning of the song does feature the repetition of a simple beat and synth line. However, the song is quickly awash in broad sweeps of synth and then harmonica, and then the singing itself, which triggers a subtle change  in the original synth line, and from there the songs begins to develop more and more layers. The "sameness" of electronica makes room for hearing, breathing, movement, and lyrics.

Brooks on de Botton (Who's on top?)

A little while ago in a review in the NY Times called "Without Gods: Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists", David Brooks discusses some of the various suggestions that de Botton has for trying to incorporate some of the religious practices that are so effective at giving people as sense of community and helping them to make sense of their lives. De Botton's recognition that much of what has traditionally been important (and compelling to people) about religion are its practices, its social and communal character, and the sense of meaning, order and purpose that people derive from it is an important one. This recognition allows de Botton to position himself against other high-profile contemporary atheists (the "Gnu atheists" as PZ Myers would say) like Richard Dawkins who tend to see nothing of value in religion whatsoever and call for its wholesale elimination.

Given my Hegelian background, wherein talk of religion and God is seen as mis-descriptions of the nature of human sociality and communal life, I find the basics of this kind of position quite attractive. This is not to say that I  think that what Dawkins et al. say about religion is false, because I do agree with them. As propositions expected to reflect empirically verifiable claims about the world and about some being called God, religion really doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. This includes, I think, cosmological arguments about the origin of matter, the big bang, and whatnot, which merely "fill in the gaps" with unbridled speculation, and certainly don't justify any talk of a deity that would recognizable from any religious tradition I know of; after all, why must the ability to create all things also entail any kind of moral goodness? You could just as easily get a Chthulu or Yog-Sothoth as a Kronos as a Jehovah...

So, I am not disagreeing with the deconstruction and debunking of many of the crazy and obviously untrue claims that Dawkins carries out; I do think it is important to make explicit some of the crazy things that are actually implicated in what people claim to believe. However, and this is where Brooks and de Botton's ideas come in, sometimes the important thing about religion is not the specific content of someone's beliefs, especially not as they can be rendered as propositions or claims, but rather it is about lived experiences and the overall sense of meaning and community that they provide. A religion is not just a set of beliefs, it is a particular kind of institution, and like all institutions it serves to mediate between other people, ideas, institutions, etc. Belief is not absent here, religions can only do this work of mediation properly when we participate in them and believe in them, but (and this is what I think Dawkins does not pay enough attention to) the belief involved is not purely intellectual and is often resistant to intellectual suasion.

This is one thing that de Botton seems to get right in his recognition of why "Religion for Atheists" might be something to consider, namely that we do need to maintain and further develop the institutions that give human life a common and stabilizing ground  (Hegelian sittlichkeit). Furthermore, if we are to criticize religion then we do need to be aware of this institutional level and to address it as well as the more intellectual propositional level of the debate, or else risk missing the point altogether.

But, as Brooks acknowledges, there is also something profoundly disingenuous about the idea of "religion for atheists" that is signaled in the contradiction in the very title. De Botton's suggestions about self-consciously inventing new rituals to take the place of religion seem as though they are destined to mostly fall afoul of the corrosive effects of self-consciousness. After all, as I mentioned, one of the important things about the institutions like religion is that they require our belief in them in order to truly function: if we don't genuinely believe in the institution then our ability to fully participate in it and benefit from it will be limited. This is particularly so in terms of deriving any sense of self, purpose, or meaning to one's life. The kind of self-identification and belief necessary to make such rituals effective seems destined to conflict with the critical self-consciousness that atheists tend to bring to the issue of religion. It seems like any "religion for atheists" would end up having to sacrifice one of those terms, and either be too ironic or self-conscious to be religious or too dogmatic to be atheistic.

This problem is a thoroughly modern one, and is intrinsically connected  to the rise of individualism, which made the critique of religion possible, but in so doing also disrupted much of the relation between the individual and any social institutions. Brooks comments on the difference that this individualism makes by comparing the writings of some founding figures of religion like Augustine to de Botton:

These writers don’t coolly shop for personal growth experiences like someone at the spiritual mall. They find themselves enmeshed in paradoxes of a richness unimaginable before they became entangled in them — that understanding comes after love, that one achieves fullness by surrendering self, that as you approach wisdom you are swept by a sensation that you have been suppressing all along, and all you need do is release....There’s something at stake in these accounts, a person’s whole destiny and soul. The process de Botton is recommending is more like going on one of those self-improving vacations. If all his advice were faithfully followed, we’d be a collection of autonomous individuals seeking a string of vaguely uplifting experiences that might perhaps leave a sediment of some sort of spiritual improvement.

Despite recognizing the important matters at stake in this issue of religious institutions, de Botton's "solutions" fail because he misconceives of the relation between individual and institutions. de Botton treats individuals in a typically modern fashion as if they originally exist outside of institutions and have to find some way to get into them, which in turn automatically estranges the two and cuts off any potential for a real relation between them.