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.

Carole King's "Jazzman"

After a long and intense post like the Hopkins one I thought I might do a shorter one covering Carole King’s “Jazzman.” A good deal of my enjoyment of this song comes from its use in The Simpsons episode “Round Springfield,” where Lisa plays it in a duet with Bleeding Gums Murphy. Their duet is well-done, and it makes a satisfying end to a really nice Lisa arc (plus I loved the Bart-Krusty B-story—the whole thing is a great example of the glory of the early The Simpsons, mostly seasons 3-6 with mixed results a few seasons before and after, and then total dreck afterwards).

Here's the Simpsons version. You've gotta love the dancing people in the hospital it is just too ridiculous and amazing. Anyway, not to pontificate too long about The Simpsons, “Jazzman” is a nice little ditty that I don’t have too much to say about, most of it is just about the (near) heavenly power of jazz music. 

 Most of the examples of its power are relatively unremarkable: 
 
“When the jazzman’s testifying
The faithless man believes
He can sing you into paradise
Or bring you to your knees.”

But there are some examples that stand out near the end:

“When the jazzman’s signifying
And the band is winding low
It’s the late-night side of morning
In the darkness of the soul.”

I like King’s play with the idea of the “dark night of the soul” and the phrasing of the “late-night side of morning.” The whole thing speaks to a cathartic musical moment. However, that catharsis is itself perhaps a little too cliche an idea to stick, no matter how well it is expressed.. Better are the lines that follow it:

“He can fill the room with sadness
As he fills his horn with tears.
He can cry like a fallen angel
When the rising time is near.”

In my opinion it is these last two lines that make the song worthwhile, or to put it another way, that elevate it above the status of “just another song” among a sea of songs. This particular image introduces something striking and relatively original in terms of musical affect.

I’m not sure if a causal listener is going to catch the depths of the sympathy for the devil that King introduces here, but the kind of sadness that King evokes with this figure is truly cosmic (and probably outside of the scope of this song). Consider the position of a fallen angel at judgement day (the “rising time”; presumably King describes it that way in order to capitalize on the contrast between falling and rising). The angel has known paradise and (especially if you buy the Romantic-Miltonian version of Lucifer’s principled rebellion against the tyranny of heaven) has chosen to reject it, betting on the worthiness of a different kind of life. Judgement day means the failure of that gamble, and that failure, coupled with the knowledge of just what has been lost, seemingly for nothing, is surely profoundly devastating. Given little to go on, I go with what is most compelling to me and interpret the fallen angel’s tears not merely as sadness for having failed, but for what that failure means. The fallen angel has spent so much time and effort rebelling against heaven only to realize the error of that rebellion when it is too late. It is painful to have failed in the service of one’s ideals, but far more painful when that failure reveals that one’s ideals are false, that one’s entire worldview is lost. Hegel called this process of the negative discovery of the truth, particularly the untruth of one’s fundamental way of looking at the world, the “way of despair,” and I think that this terms is accurate here.

Now, it is possible that King doesn’t mean to go so dark, and the fallen angel is actually crying from joy because he has seen the light and gets to go home, and that too has the potential to be a beautiful moment, but it isn’t as compelling as the sadness of a fallen angel realizing the true extent of his fallenness at the very point at which the possibility of redemption has passed. There is room in the world for music that speaks to the sadness of those who are beyond redemption and know it.

G. M. Hopkins: "[No worst, there is none.]"

It’s not all songs and lyrics here—as I’ve already dissected a church sign—so I’m going to tackle a poem as well, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “[No worst, there is none].” I’m doing it partly because it is one of my favourite poems, but also because someone who I recently recommended it to asked if this was my writing on it, which it is not. (Not that I wouldn’t be happy to claim it, but it’s not.) But in the interest of presenting a fuller and more comprehensive (dare I say comprehensible) exposition of what I find fascinating about this poem, here it goes.

Here’s the text of the poem:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

It’s pretty intense and compressed stuff, and if you need help untangling some of the wordage the above link is useful, but for what I want to discuss, which is more the overall meaning of the poem, then it is more useful to attend to the comment by Catherine Madsen that is at the bottom of the page that I have linked to. There Madsen writes:

“Re: the line “No worst, there is none,” the meaning is surely not “There is nothing worse than this” but “There is ALWAYS something worse than the worst we can imagine.” Hopkins is echoing lines from King Lear, Act IV Scene i:
EDGAR
[Aside] O gods! Who is’t can say ‘I am at the worst’?
I am worse than e’er I was.
…
And worse I may be yet: the worst is not
So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’

Hopkins can’t know how much worse the “more pangs” will be than the “forepangs,” and this is part of the desperation of the experience; there is no limit to suffering. Except perhaps the exhaustion of death or sleep, whichever comes first.”

Madsen’s point about the fact that the worst is potentially limitless—that there can always be something worse than what is currently the worst, up to the point of death—is spot on, and I think it is the tension between the awful infinitude of life and the awful finitude of death that gives this poem its power and speculative depth. (As a side note in terms of speculative depth, the Lear connection is a good one—and not just because Lear is my favourite Shakespearean work—because of the way that it works with the same kind of logic that Hegel used against the Kantian notion of the thing-in-itself, namely, the idea that if we have the knowledge necessary to set down a limit to our knowledge, then have already technically gone beyond those limits.)

In terms of what I have called the awful infinitude of life, there is the process described in the early lines, namely, the way that “More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” The idea here is that grief and pain and anxiety are not set, stable things. To a far greater degree than in the case with our existence in the external world, our thoughts and feelings and experiences are relatively unconstrained in terms of their “size” and “complexity.” Pains and fears and sufferings do not come over us as isolated occurrences, they are connected to each other and to our own history and can build upon each other (not unlike the cries that huddle “herds-long”). Not only can pangs we have felt before provoke new ones, but they can also help to determine—and intensify—the form and the degree of pangs to come (in Hopkins’ terms, they “schooled” by them). In this way they can deepen and expand and intensify and thereby seem to almost take on a life of their own (or, in especially unfortunate cases, take on our lives as their own); in this possibility lies the continual possibility of an ever-new “worst.”

The image of the mountains of the mind in the second section of the poem is important because it points out the connection between our intelligence and the (potentially) limitless suffering detailed in the first section. In a kind of spiritual equivalent to the idea “what goes up must come down,” or in other words, that the heights to which our minds can aspire are also the source of so much misery. The higher one goes the further the potential fall—and the fall is much faster and gathers momentum much faster than the ascent—hence the image of the cliff as a revelation of the precariousness of that height. (As a side note, the abyss was a favorite Romantic image for the experience of infinite negativity for just this reason.)

In intellectual terms, the idea is that it is our higher capacities for memory and anticipation and projection, our awareness of ourselves and of others—all of which go so far to making up the complexity of our thoughts and reactions—that can also serve as the perfect medium for the development of a potentially infinite spiral of misery (infinite at least in terms of their being no internal limit to it—there is no necessary end to the forms of our misery, no reason it can’t just keep going on and on; as for external limits to it, well that’s a matter of our analysis a little further on). As potentially infinite, these depths are “no-man-fathomed,” they cannot be exhaustively mapped or experienced.

If this sounds a little melodramatic, consider the “whirlwind” of the second last line—could it not be the maddening rush of miserable thoughts going round and round someone’s head without end (and don't forget that the circle is an image of infinity). And furthermore, have you not yourself seen the effects of this in those people whose lives seem to be absolutely twisted up in misery in the most complex and convoluted ways—the knot they have made of their lives seems endless. (Although there is much to admire in complexity, such people are fascinating only at a distance such as in a work of art, in real life they are likely to be as destructive as whirlwinds themselves.)

Ok, to pull back for a moment, if what I have been describing is the potentially infinite negativity inherent in life (particularly self-conscious life), there is also the other rather distressing pole to this poem, that of finitude of life (i.e., mortality, death). In my little parenthetical note about the potentially infinite nature of misery two paragraphs ago I mentioned that misery didn’t necessarily need to recognize any internal limits but that external limits still applied. The most obvious limit is our own mortality, we can after all, only be miserable as long as we are alive. (To continue the parenthetical party, while it seems relatively uncontroversial to say that we don’t feel any misery before we live, there are lots of people who would disagree with the idea that there is no misery once we are dead. I don’t have any reason to think things are much different for us after we are dead than before we were alive, but if you are attached to a horrifying idea like the truly infinite misery of a hell, well, this poem will say different things to you.)

The fact that “each day dies with sleep” speaks to the relief that an end can bring, although that sense of relief is definitely mitigated by its alignment with death, but hey they don’t call them the “terrible sonnets” because they are focused on the lighter sides of existence (or, as the low-hanging joke goes, because they are poorly written). Our finitude both serves as a relief and a prompt for our sorrows. Time in particular is the mechanism (?) or medium (?)--god knows what to say of time in this regard—of our suffering and our relief. Time heaps on the misery and in time our misery will end: our sorrows, in Hopkins’ words, “on an age-old anvil wince and sing— / Then lull, then leave off.”

This anvil image leads to what might be the strangest part of the poem, the lines: “Fury had shrieked ‘No ling- / ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.’” I take the personalization of fury to be a reference to the Greek furies (the Erinyes) who were goddesses of vengeance. The furies arose when an oath was broken and they would hound the oath-breaker endlessly. Orestes was their most famous target for killing his mother Clytemnestra (who he killed because she killed her father—basically, the story is more convoluted....). The furies are thus figures representing the necessity and potential endlessness of suffering. I think the single fury here enforces the administration of the “chief woe, world-sorrow” that is the human condition, this misery that hounds us throughout all of our days, not letting us linger. There is, of course, the fun little lingering of “ling-ering” across the divide of the lines, or maybe the break in the word illustrates the brevity and inevitable falling-off of any lingering. Either way, in attempting to hold off or to dramatize the flow of time, the line ultimately draws our attention to the flow of time (and the abuse that it brings—consider the image of the anvil). And to top it all off, the hounding of the fury, our time-bound condition, is even more cruel (“fell”) because our lives are brief. Whatever comfort there is in this life is merely relative, provisional, it is whatever can serve as such—poorly, no doubt—in this whirlwind.

Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies #5: The Posies--"Golden Blunders"

It’s time to combine two great things (in my estimation at least): The Posies and Cheery Songs About Unintended Pregnancies. Given the Posies’ penchant for writing (relatively) shiny pop music about twisted and dark things it should not be surprising that one of the singles off of their major label debut Dear 23, is actually a song about unintended pregnancy (that’s the golden blunder).

Now, at first it is not exactly clear that this is what the song is about, as the first lines of the song point only to the general theme of the mistakes that we make as we grow up:

Golden blunders come in pairs, they’re very unaware
What they know is what they’ve seen
Education wasn’t fun, but now that school is done
Higher learning’s just begun.

I appreciate the jab at the practical limitations of schooling here—both in terms of the incredible tedium that can accompany it and the fact that so much learning has nothing to do with testable facts and far more to do with the development of judgement (that’s the real higher learning, not university). Indeed, judgement is key because it does not depend upon rules but experience because it must be so responsive to context (in this regard Kant and Aristotle would agree in an awkward way). 
 
Long story short, acquiring judgement requires experience, and a crucial element of that experience is failure and making mistakes, which is precisely what the chorus says:

You're gonna watch what you say for a long time
You're gonna suffer the guilt forever
You're gonna get in the way at the wrong time
You're gonna mess up things you thought you would never.
 
Now before diving into the rest of the song, I want to return to the question of the title and how it relates to this chorus (I’ll get there eventually, it just takes a bit of a detour into Beatles-land, a fact that shouldn’t be surprising given the melodic stylings of the Posies’ early recordings). Part of the title is a reference to The Beatles’ song “Golden Slumbers” from Abbey Road (a fact made more interesting by the fact that Ringo Starr recorded a cover of this song—although the original Posies version is much better). “Golden Slumbers” is an adaption of an old lullaby, and it is a soothing song. But the fact that you need a soothing song implies that is something troubling you, and the recurring lines of the song seem to be the suggestion that you can never go back home:

Once there was a way

to get back homeward.

Once there was a way

To get back home.

There once was a way to make everything fine again, to go back home, but after a certain point that’s no longer possible and then all you can do is look for the comfort of a lullaby and go to sleep, to forget your blunders for a little while. Ok, so the connection is pretty loose at this point, but “Golden Slumbers” is part of a medley and its leads into “Carry that Weight,” which has these lines which the Posies are clearly referencing both thematically and melodically: “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight for a long time, / Carry that weight a long time.” Couple this with the fact that “Carry that Weight” references an earlier song on the album that is about growing up and making mistakes and feeling lost (“You Never Give Me Your Money”--although that song is also about The Beatles financial situation), and you suddenly have a much clearer sense of the referential web that The Posies are weaving here.

And now to get to the pregnancy part, if “Golden Slumbers” is a lullaby (and hence something you would sing to a child), then “Golden Blunders” works as a kind of lullaby that you sing to children on their way to becoming adults and, as it turns out, on their way to having children of their own. The lyrics that follow are certainly and obviously about the perils of committing to someone heedlessly, but there are hints that pregnancy is as big a danger as anything in this arrangement:

His and hers forever more, throw your freedom out of the door
Before you find out what it's for
(Chorus)
Four weeks seemed like a long time then - but nine months is longer now
But even if you never speak again - you've already made the wedding vow

The loss of freedom that comes from getting together with someone, even it actually goes as far as marrying them, is something, sure, but it pales in comparison to having a child with them. That’s what the “four weeks” to “nine months” comparison is about, and that is the real “wedding vow.” It is the responsibility for a new life coming from the irresponsibility of a brief and (relatively) meaningless interlude that gives the chorus its drama and weight (a weight that the mother will literally have to carry).

This being established, the last thing that I will note is that I find it quite surprising how moral and preachy this song gets at the end:

Honeymoons will never start, bonds will blow apart
Just as fast as they were made
Men and women please beware: don't pretend you care
Nothing lasts when nothing's there.

It’s not bad advice, but it seems rare for pop songs to carry explicit advice like this, especially since it is advice that may result in not having sex with someone, and may require exercising responsibility. While The Posies were never this preachy again, I feel like this was probably a bad indication of their mainstream rock star potential.

Selena Gomez--"Love you Like a Love Song"

So, in the course of thinking about abstraction in my last post I considered picking on Selena Gomez’s “Love You Like a Love Song” because its a song that I’ve had to suffer through more times than I’d care to and the blandness of the title (which is also about 90% of the lyrical content of the song) speaks to its featureless abstraction.

After all, given the general blandness of most love songs, to say something like I love you like a love song sounds like it is just compounding abstraction upon abstraction. But even though the song isn’t good or enjoyable, upon listening to it a little more closely I can at least say that the song wears its abstraction knowingly, perhaps even to the extent that it could be said that it is unconsciously critical of its entire genre. Maybe that last claim stretches it too far, but I try not to be too abstract myself by one-sidedly condemning things (see Hegel’s twistedly charming little essay Who Thinks Abstractly? for an abstruse but fun illustration of how easy it is to be abstract without knowing it—also note that there is nothing redeemable about Fergie’s “Me Myself I”).

Anyway, if you want to follow me down this path, just consider the line “I love you like a love song.” Its pretty bland since there is nothing unexpected or unusual about the simile, and verbally the repetition of the word “love” contributes to this (as does the near-endless repetition of the line itself). But all of this should not let us overlook what it means to love someone like a love song, for it is not as if the two terms of comparison are identical. Love songs tend to portray the extremes of love: intense obsession (I’m thinking primarily of the very first moments of falling in love, but also the scarier forms of obsession) and heartbreak, but they also tend to be simple, catchy and repetitive, which is to say, the very epitome of pop songs.

What’s worth noticing is the way that these two sets of qualities tend to go together—obsession and heartbreak alike tend to provoke repetition: “I need to see them again,” “I can’t stop thinking about them,” etc. This need for repetition, it seems to me, comes from the fact that both obsession and heartbreak are defined by the lack of their object. Both are in their own way blinded to the reality of their object by the desire for its possession, a fact that renders the whole relation rather abstract and thus in need of constant reinforcement.

In this regard perhaps there is something to this idea that there is a type of love like a love song: one that is intense, immediate, overly dramatic, and a matter of compulsive repetition in order to keep the feeling alive. And there is one more commonality linked to these, the abstractness of the love song, which we see in the vagueness of the image of the beloved and concomitant overemphasis upon the lover’s relatively unanchored feelings. This abstractness helps to fulfil the function of the love song, which is to promote identification with the song’s affect and to prompt its repetition. After all, the more abstract the lover and beloved the easier it is to project one’s own feelings onto them while at the same time enjoying their apparent objectification.

The qualities of abstraction and repetition at in the love song here happen to be just what Gomez’s song is about, particularly if you note that the line after the repetition of “I love you like a love song” is “And I keep hittin’ repeat-peat-peat-peat-peat-peat.” While this message comes through more on a formal level through its intense repetition than any real lyrical exploration, even at the level of its lyrics there is self-awareness about this fact, as the beginning of the song introduces its context as one of the depletion of the content of a love song in favour of repetition:

“It's been said and done
Every beautiful thought's been already sung
And I guess right now here's another one”

Now to return to the issue of abstractness, I guess we can say that this is a song that at least semi-self-consciously revels in its own abstractness by making itself into the formal convergence of love and love song and the abandonment of any content.

Bruce Springsteen--"Into the Fire"

I’ve railed against abstraction in other songs--”Renegades,” for instance—but in listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Into the Fire” recently, I have also been thinking about when it works.

After all, abstraction is not automatically a bad thing, its just that works of art are traditionally all about concreteness (although the 20^th century certainly explored the exceptions to this tradition, though often in terms of sensory abstraction or purity), so it often feels like a cheap betrayal of what art can be when, instead of something specific, all we get are bland and vague generalities.

On the face of it, the chorus of “Into the Fire” is largely a string of abstractions:

“May your strength give us strength,

May your faith give us faith,

May your hope give us hope,

May your love give us love.”

Not only are those abstractions repeated within the line (“strength...strength,” etc.), but they are repeated continuously throughout the song. But even though strength, faith, hope, and love are some of the most potentially vague and empty and overused terms, they don’t feel like it here. There are at least two reasons for this.

The first reason is that they have a very particular context in this song. “Into the Fire” comes from Springsteen’s album The Rising, which was written as a response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, which the very first lines of the song evoke:

"The sky was falling and streaked with blood
I heard you calling me, then you disappeared into the dust
Up the stairs, into the fire
Up the stairs, into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs,
Into the fire"

The falling sky, the fire, blood, and dust are all images of the devastation of 9/11, and the lines “Up the stairs, into the fire,” refer to the actions of the emergency personnel, particularly the firefighters, who went towards the danger—up the stairs, into the fire—while everyone else was fleeing it. The person this song is directed to, the “you” whose strength, etc., is being called upon, is one of these firefighters, so that context already helps to fill out the meaning of these otherwise abstract terms. The different verses of the song all emphasize prioritizing self-sacrifice for the greater good over choosing a good rooted in self-interest (“I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher”). The ascent up the stairs is thus also an ascent towards higher forms of these virtues than their everyday versions.

And this brings me to the second reason why Springsteen’s invocation of them is not merely abstract. Looking at the form of the appeal to these virtues (“May your strength give us strength”), the “May your..” construction as well as their almost ritualistic repetition (complete with a choir’s worth of backup singers by the end of the song), makes their invocation more of a prayer or an appeal than anything. What this means is that instead of using abstract terms like love as a shortcut or a placeholder, this song is actually a call to fill them with emotional content. To a certain extent the subject matter of the song does this, and in another way so performative nature of these lines—by calling out for strength, so the idea goes, we gain strength.

Musical Shipwrecks: The Tragically Hip--"Nautical Disaster"

With the news that Gord Downie, the lead singer and songwriter for The Tragically Hip, was diagnosed with a terrible form of brain cancer, and with the giant (possibly farewell) concert they put on in August, The Hip are in the spotlight in a way that they haven’t been for a long time. So although I’ve never been very concerned with being current, since their song “Nautical Disaster” is definitely on my list of songs about shipwrecks, I think this is a good time to look at it (it also happens to be my favorite Hip song anyway, so that doesn’t hurt).

In terms of discussion of the song, a lot of people get hung up on trying to identify the historical referent for this particular disaster, citing anything from the landing at Dieppe in WW2, to the sinking of the Bismarck, to the Lancastria. But I am inclined to agree with the commenter wonderdog from songmeanings.com (http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/65612/ --his post is the top one, and its also useful because summarizes these historical possibilities) that connecting it to any particular historical even really doesn’t add much to the understanding of the song. If you know anything about what happens in a nautical disaster in general, then you know enough for this song. The song itself hedges its bets about the reality of this experience through the language it uses at the beginning (“I had this dream”; “It was as though”).

But what does need to be grasped is the emotional truth of this nautical disaster, and part of the reason why I think that this is the greatest song of the Hip’s is that Downie’s lyrics are so evocative. One of the high points is the imagery of “five hundred more [men] thrashing madly / As parasites might, in your blood.” The image of men struggling for their lives in the water (and 8 times their number already dead) is horrific enough, but to introduce the parasite image is to draw that horror into oneself, or imagine oneself infected by the sight of it and inspire a kind of revulsion. In part that revulsion comes from the content of the image. I think of wriggling leeches somehow on the inside, but whatever you picture when someone says parasite, I’m sure its not pretty.

What makes the image even worse, however, is if you think through the consequences of thinking of these people as internal parasites. The contempt and revulsion that we associate with parasites get transferred to these poor souls and that seems especially cruel and awful. But as the next lines in the song reveal, this attitude is necessary: these parasites must be dispatched so that we may live. In this case, it is a matter of limited space within a lifeboat:

Now I was in a lifeboat designed for ten, ten only
Anything that systematic would get you hated
It's not a deal nor a test nor a love of something fated

These lines spell out the terms of survival, with the main constraint being how many can fit into the lifeboat. This discussion comes up, I suspect, because of the guilt related to it. It is hard to cling to accept that the distinction between the living and the dead, the drowned and the saved (whichever side of it you’re on), comes down to something as banal as a number, a safety recommendation. There’s nothing preordained or noble or necessary about it, it just is what it is, and that’s hard to live with or die because of. And the same goes with the selection of the crew itself, its cold and heartless:

The selection was quick, the crew was picked in order
And those left in the water
Got kicked off our pant leg
And we headed for home

But this decision, this whole situation, is not cold and heartless in the sense of something detached or abstract like a “deal or a test or a love of something fated.” No, the sheer physicality of this decision—pick the survivors and actively fight off those who cling on anyways and head for home (without looking back? At least not immediately?)--again centres this decision squarely within the realm of survival.

But the heart of this song is the idea that no matter what justifies such a break (even survival), justification is not always enough to avoid the consequences, as the final verse in the song reminds its listeners that the previous scene was a dream:

Then the dream ends when the phone rings
"You doing all right?"
He said, "It's out there most days and nights
But only a fool would complain"
Anyway, Susan, if you like
Our conversation is as faint a sound in my memory
As those fingernails scratching on my hull

But it is not just the dream element that adds ambiguity to the song, but the abrupt shift from reporting to direct address that happens at the “Anyway, Susan” line. The phone call speaks to the existence of some kind of guilt (presumably from the events that inspired the dream, although the song never actually confirms the reality of this experience), but the end of the quote of this conversation also ends the report that began the song with “I had this dream.....” The final lines directed to Susan (which are quite devastating) is a shift that has the potential to redirect the meaning of everything that came before. Is the whole shipwreck dream simply meant to be an illustration of what is going on between the narrator and Susan—is the shipwreck at issue in this song actually the wreck of a relationship, a rumination of getting over the guilt of leaving? It may be and that’s a compelling reading, or it also may be a song about how we get on with things, where the pragmatic answer to survivor’s guilt (“only a fool would complain”) provides the context for how to deal with less troubles such as may have come up with Susan (the positive reading of that “if you like”). Or it may be about the cost of that survivor’s guilt where the narrator has trouble dealing with such troubles except through a kind of repression or active forgetting (the sarcastic reading of the “if you like”). I don’t think there is an answer, but that is what makes this so interesting.

But in praising the song it is important to give props to the music as well—the swirling guitar and bass of the intro creates an appropriate eerie and dreamlike atmosphere for Downie to set the scene. We get the musical equivalent of groping our way through the fog (perhaps the fog of a dream) before it lifts at about 0:53 to begin revealing the horror with an appropriate shift in musical intensity. At this point the drums crash insistently, almost chaotically, the cymbals being especially prominent, reflecting the general clamour and tumult off the scene. The guitar begins to pick up pace, working through faster variations of the swirling arpeggios with which the the song began, taking on a stronger presence by 1:10 (“Thrashing madly as parasite might, in your blood”) and finally becoming the signature guitar line of the song 1:43 (“It’s not a deal nor a test...). What does this guitar line “mean,” and what does it do for the song? Its insistent wavering back and forth makes me think of it as the sonic representation of the search for escape, or trying to break free. This fits with its prominence at 2:07, the point where they finally “head for home,” we begin the bridge in which that underlying guitar line winds its way through a little solo as if seeking resolution, seeking home.

Then at 2:23 we get a brief rest, almost a return to the peace of the intro (as the dream ends) but then the emotional tenor almost immediately ramps up again and the Susan section marks the return of the winding guitar line which leads to the outro sol at 3:03, an extended riff on that guitar line seeking some kind of resolution across an even broader range before the guitar line exhaust itself (perhaps) without relief at 3:40. It’s an appropriately ambiguous ending for the song and an example of how to end songs right.