The Keene Brothers - "Lost Upon Us"

Well, if you thought that this might be me branching out to another new artist....no, more than anything, The Keene Brothers is more of a Guided By Voices offshoot, with Robert Pollard teaming up with Tommy Keene for a really excellent album. Keene's talent for power pop really brings out the best in Pollard (and seemingly the other way around too, though I don't know Keene so well). It particularly shines in the gorgeous ballad "Death of the Party" and this song, "Lost Upon Us":

The chiming guitars, the lovely melodies, yeah it's right up my musical alley.

Lyrically the song is also interesting, although like most Pollard creations it is difficult to say exactly what the song is means, but it is possible to gesture towards the senses of meaningfulness that is creates. To explore some of its mysteries, for one, it is not entirely clear to me why Pollard adopted the phrasing "lost upon us." Usually we say that something is "lost on us," for instance, if there is something I don't understand or appreciate then I might say that it was "lost on me." There is generally little semantic difference between "on" and "upon," it just happens that some words typically pair with one or the other. "Lost" typically pairs with "on," but it may just be that Pollard liked the rhythm of the extra syllable better. 

But accompanying this is the ambiguity of the phrase itself: is it good or bad that these things are "lost upon us." The first lines of the song are very ambiguous in this regard:

In the holier trials, yes,

Lost upon us

Stare down your throat

Into the dust

[Chorus:] Barely bleeding

From scratching and screaming

And all is immersed in perfection and cursed

Just to save you

What are the "holier trials?" I am guessing they are the times when we are tested in the course of pursuing some kind of higher purpose, and the things that are lost upon us, that ultimately  do not trouble us, are the obstacles that we must surmount: I'm "barely bleeding" from the scratching and screaming involved in saving someone, and don't even notice it, perhaps? Or perhaps it is the "you" who is doing the scratching and screaming, it's hard to say. Clearly the situation is both desperate but also about transcending that. The fact that this struggle is what the chorus is about suggests that it is also the main thing lost upon us in the song.

In that case, it's probably a good thing that those bad things don't fully register. But the second to last line of this chorus, has its own ambiguity that needs some unpacking. Does it read

And all is immersed in perfection and cursed

or,

And all is immersed in perfection and curse

I'm not sure how much difference it ultimately makes to the song, but in the first one, the "cursed" at the end signals a potentially causal relationship. By being "immersed in perfection" things are "cursed." This suggests that perfection is ultimately corrosive and distorting, likely because, when things are immersed in perfection, their distance from it, their inability to live up to its standards, makes them seem all the worse (and unfairly so). This is, in other words, the idea that the "perfect is the enemy of the good." What is less clear is how this helps, how it is all "just to save you," as the final line of the chorus puts it. Is the "you" of the song being idolized here, everything is immersed in the perfection of you and thus cursed in comparison?

Or is it that all of the prior struggle (in this "holier trial") is immersed in perfection, that is, it is viewed from the perspective of completion, and cursed perhaps in the sense of being denigrated as falling short of that or of standing in that way of it? It is hard to say, and the second reading actually seems a little clearer in this regard. My thought is that perfection and curse are both terms of judgment, and if those are the terms that you use to judge everything, then perhaps you are bound to fall on the side of perfection since the alternative is so extreme. Or perhaps everything is immersed in them insofar as it is exposed to the extremes of experience, the extremely good and bad, and they must be undergone.

Not surprisingly for a Pollard song, I don't have an airtight interpretation for all of this, but at least in exploring them we get a sense of the emotional stakes in general. It also lets me look at one of the nicer turns of phrase that occurs in the song later:

And the flimsier fences

Built against us

Born within us

When love is not

Lost upon us

The first three lines are fairly straightforward: Pollard is singing about the kinds of internal walls that keep us apart and keep us down. They are ones that are sometimes imposed on us by the world ("built against us"), and sometimes we do it to ourselves ("born within us"). But what is interesting are the two possibilities for how the final two lines can be read. Just by reading the lyrics it seems as though these fences are erected "When love is not lost upon us," but this seems like a strange thing to say. Do we get tangled in all of these things when we engage with love, when it doesn't pass us by? Its unusual for a rock and roll song to deny the saving power love altogether (outside of a heartbreak song of course, but this doesn't seem like that).

Instead, I think the song (and Pollard's vocals) treat the break between "When love is not" and "Lost upon us" seriously. Those fences come into being "when love is not," i.e., when it is absent, and for us, who have undergone the holier trials, who have suffered together and stayed together, we who love, all of those fences are lost upon us. Love allows us to pay them no mind. Immersed in perfection, we curse them and cast them aside.

Finally, I can get to my favourite lines in the song:

As the outspoken terms

Are tethered and blocked off

They keep all you have learned

As an osmotic toss-off

Being lost upon us

The big question here is who "they" are: I think they refer to the "outspoken terms," which suggests that the process is one of the struggle to express/establish oneself which runs into the same kinds of barriers as mentioned earlier (the "flimsier fences" tether and block them). I'm not sure if the terms are words of expression, or terms as conditions of proceeding (here made explicit), but they reflect what has been overcome, even if they themselves are blocked off. 

 But even those restricted terms retain the lessons learned

Ken Stringfellow - "110 or 220V"

I could easily keep posting Guided by Voices content (and to a certain extent I will), but I will do something at least a little different and look at Ken Stringfellow's (one half of The Posies) song "110 or 220V," another song (like "Shittalkers," which I covered earlier) off of Danzig in the Moonlight. Here's the song

and the lyrics (as I've transcribed them myself, so any errors are mine):

I could never know you
And I never really want to
Is what love says to me

Pull some faces from a jar
And spread 'em on your outline
Until you have ceased to be

Reality is subject to cancellation
But whoever said I would be free
I created myself and volunteered
for the confederacy
I lost all the faith I had at the battle of New Orleans
Our country died, drowned in its sleep

Everybody thinks they are a lover and a fighter
A kind of spaceship hero
Well I was still leaning on that lie
And if they caught me again they'd sentence me so I could never die

But now the deals have all been struck
The prizes, they're all claimed up
There's nothing left worth staking

Put your hands into the darkness
And drive from your psyche
The model of modern efficiency
At 110 or 220V
I hope there's still something you still want to see in me

So, first of all, I've got to mention how gorgeous the harmonica is: its plaintive wail gets me every time. And it sets the tone for a pretty bleak opening: the initial lines are ambiguous, its not clear whether the grim picture that is "what love says to me" is a message that has delivered to the speaker through experience, or whether it is what that word/concept says to him. But either way it marks this song as one of loss and weariness. The song runs through these experiences, occupying what seems to be a series of historically dislocated positions.

The second stanza gets even deeper into the sense of dislocation by developing an image straight out of The Beatles' depressive tour de force: "Eleanor Rigby" (she who "keeps her face in a jar by the door"):
Pull some faces from a jar
And spread 'em on your outline
Until you have ceased to be
The face, rather than being the seat of personal identity, conceals and ultimately obliterates identity. At least for Rigby there is still just one face, the public face that she presents to the world, presumably a positive one that hides the lonely and impoverished reality of her life. 

In "110 or 220V" the situation seems even more extreme: there is no longer just a single face, but a jar full of them (and they are generically just "some faces," not even Rigby's "her face"), and like jam they get spread all over. What they cover is equally vague and empty, only "your outline." This whole situation reminds me of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," where Eliot declares that "there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet." This vision of the social world treats it as a realm of pure externality: faces meeting other faces while the people behind them never meet.   

There are no guarantees to life or to experience, nothing propping them up, hence Stringfellow's play on the contractual terminology of reality being "subject to cancellation." I am not sure what to make about the part about the confederacy and the battle of New Orleans. I assume the latter is a reference to the battle in the American Civil War, not the War of 1812, but it's hard to say why this is THE detail in the song. Does the South stand for the last romantic vestige of the pre-modern, a time when we could create ourselves and determine our own lives? The lines that follow about the heroic (though also false) ideal of the spaceship suggest that there is some kind of historical contrast being developed here and that something has been lost: our faces, instead of being self-created, are mass produced and sipped in jars?

Certainly the final lines of the song bolster the idea that despite whatever illumination/ enlightenment may accompany modernity, there is a darkness that continues to linger, and above all, there is still the desire to be loved for oneself, whoever that self may be:  

Put your hands into the darkness
And drive from your psyche
The model of modern efficiency
At 110 or 220V
I hope there's still something you still want to see in me

 

Guided by Voices - "Twilight Campfighter"

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

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

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

As we vegetate and wait around for brighter days

And can dance contented to the sound of money

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

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

Could I have seen a sight

Much greater than your twilight eyes

That penetrate our silent lives (lies)?

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

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

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

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representing Lacerated Consciousness Part Two

Phew, long break with most of this post just sitting in "Drafts" for two years.  I've finally worked my way into a more sustainable set of obligations (plus a pandemic!) so here it is.

In the previous post I introduced my particular take on The Posies in terms of "lacerated consciousness"

This perspective is present in The Posies work from the very beginning. Their very first album was called "Failure," that should be a good indicator right there, and one of the best songs on the album, "I May Hate You Sometimes" already embodies this laceration on both the level of form and content. But before going on to that, I have two brief notes about the opening song "Blind Eyes Open."

First, the drumming in it is really fascinating. Now, I believe it is Jon Auer on drums on the album (since it was an independent effort he and Ken, the two main Posies, played all of the instruments on the recording), so we have him to thank. The interesting, kind of syncopated rhythm (I certainly don't have the "drumming knowledge" to characterize it) with which the drums are introduced at 0:10 is already very striking. The drums really catch my attention when they move to the forefront in the chorus starting around 0:55. The regular but sparse snap of the snare (?) and cymbal (?) together throughout this sequence is weirdly awkward and compelling. I don't have a lot to say about it other than: just listen.

The second thing I want to mention is that this song contains one of the most excellent puns I've ever heard in the song at 2:45: "my nerve ends send sensational headlines to my brain." "Sensational headlines" usually refers to the kinds of outsize messages that tend to get our attention at the top of newspaper articles, but the reference to "nerve ends" and the "brain" emphasize the "head" part of headlines. Plus there is the aural plays in the "ends -> send -> sensational" series of sounds.

Ok puns aside, let's talk about "I May Hate You Sometimes."

The basic meaning of the song can be found in the whole line of which the title is a part: "I may hate you sometimes, but I'll always love you." This line speaks to typical Posies ambivalence: intertwined feelings of love and hatred. Much of the song recounts the difficulties of one person feeling like they fall short of the standards of another. In one of their live recordings ("In Case You Didn't Feel Like Plugging In"), after "Please Return It" and before this song, Jon mentions that Ken wrote the former about him and that he wrote "I May Hate You Sometimes" about Ken. The brilliant duo embody self-laceration in their relation to each other as well.

The stand-out part of the song that I want to look at begins at 2:35 with the following lyrics:

Now that I'm filled with emotion
You're dispassionate
You only live for yourself
And now I live to regret
But don't ever think that
I could easily forget
Because I'm damned if I do
And I'm damned if I don't
I said that I would
But now I know that I won't
And the chance of being right
Is looking kind of remote

As with The New Pornographers' "The End of Medicine," this part of the song is just bursting with intellectual energy. The short rhyming lines give the song a tight dynamism which, coupled with the abrupt reversals, speak to the energy invested into self-reflection and self-division here. In terms of reversals, everything is subsumed in its opposite: the song veers from emotional vulnerability ("filled with emotion") to rejection ("You're dispassionate") and can only respond to self-centredness ("You only live for yourself") with regret at being sucked into that self-centredness, that leaves him in a seemingly impossible position in which all choices and all forms of escape look bad ("damned if I do / don't"). As a result he knows his resolve to do something will inevitably dissolve, and that it will also prove to be a mistake, and yet eve in full knowledge of this he can do no other.

The "speaker" here has analyzed the situation, taking past and present into account and projecting failure into the future.

The New Pornographers - Live

I saw one of my favorite bands, "The New Pornographers," recently so here is quick post on the concert. Now, it was a relatively short set (1 hour) but without any breaks, so a lot of music got packed into it. While I can't reproduce the set list in order beyond a few notes (they opened with "Dancehall Domine," "Use It" was the 3rd song, and they closed with "The Bleeding Heart Show) here is a breakdown of every song they played by album (and note, they played at least one song from each album):

MR - "Mass Romantic"

EV - "A Testament to Youth in Verse"
"The Laws Have Changed"

TC- "Use It"
"The Bleeding Heart Show"

Ch- "All the Old Showstoppers"

T- "Moves"

BB- "Brill Bruisers"
"Champions of Red Wine"
"Dancehall Domine"

WC- "Play Money"
"Whiteout Conditions"
"High Ticket Attractions"
"This is the World of the Theatre"

As I begin I should also make a brief note about the lineup: Dan Bejar was not with them (he wasn't involved in Whiteout Conditions but I hope that it is simply a timing issue, I may not always appreciate the Bejar songs as much, but they added a lot of texture to the albums and  "War on the East Coast" and "Born with a Sound" were some of my favorite tracks off of Brill Bruisers), and neither was Neko Case. Being a huge Case fan I was hoping she would be with them, but her not being there wasn't too bad since Kathryn Calder does a great job. There was only one song, "Play Money," that really needed Case, the violinist/vocalist who did Case's vocals had a little squawk with the high notes and couldn't give the song the verve it needs to work. "Play Money" largely gets by on its attitude (it's not nearly as strong as the other cuts from Whiteout Conditions that they played) and it was probably the weakest song on the list.

The runner-up for weakest song would probably be "Moves," which seemed like a strange choice from that album. I was really hoping for "Up in the Dark," which is one of my favorite songs of theirs, period, but even "Crash Years" would have been better. Maybe "Crash Years" would have needed Case, and "Moves" was more familiar because it was in a car commercial. Oh well, as I noted, they played "Use It" three songs into their set, so at least I got what I wanted there. Playing it early alleviated my anxiety about whether I would get to hear at least one song I really wanted to hear: on that list were "Use It," "Sing Me Spanish Techno," "My Rights Versus Yours," and "Up in the Dark"; sure I only got one out of this four, but I thoroughly enjoyed the concert. "Use It" may be their best song and contains one of my favorite lines: "Two sips from the cup of human kindness and I'm s#it-faced." The time-bending dynamics of "Sing Me Spanish Techno" would be really fun live, too. As for "My Rights Versus Yours," if its about a custody battle (or divorce proceeding) I can see why it doesn't get live play, but it is a fantastic song and I remember when that album first came out and I got it and played it for a friend, and those early "ooooooh" notes were part of what got him hooked on the band.

Among the pleasant surprises were how good "Champions of Red Wine" sounded, its shimmering texture on the album translated well into a live context, "All the Old Showstoppers" is a song that never really caught my ear, and yet it was good live, and the climax of "The Bleeding Heart Show" really worked as a finisher. Great show.

Representing Lacerated Consciousness, Part One

While I don't have a lot of interest in the band Linkin Park, someone I am working with is a big fan, so I read this essay about them by Spencer Kornhaber. One part of the essay that caught my eye was where Kornhaber talked about how rock has long worked at expanding the potential range and form of emotional expression available to men. What this means is that (without necessarily giving up on misogyny or many of the traditional features of masculinity) it came to be acceptable for male singers to write songs dealing with angst, failure, and vulnerability without seeming like "wimps," as Kornhaber puts it. Kornhaber brings up grunge as an example, writing about how

"Sonically, the songs thrived on dichotomies of loud/soft and pretty/grating; the effect was less to gild aggression with sweetness than to wring drama and verisimilitude from the feeling of internal conflict."

For many this loud/soft dichotomy defines grunge, and a song like Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box," which I would say is all about the singer's ambivalence towards a woman (his lover? mother? its hard to say but I actually lean towards the latter: don't discount the fact that it was on "In Utero," the idea of being "forever in debt," "angel hair and baby's breath," and the "Throw down your umbilical noose" line). The ambivalent feelings the singer feels (attraction/repulsion) are mirrored by the quiet verse and loud chorus so yes, the form mirrors the content. I guess on a theoretical level I should enjoy this harmony of form and content, but I don't. Despite growing up at exactly the right time to be a Nirvana fan (so many people wore "In Utero" t-shirts in those days), I never really got into them and still haven't. And no doubt some what I say next is just a reflection of my own preferences (for thought, phrasing, and articulation), but that's what you get when I'm the one writing, so here it is.

The loud/soft dynamic in "Heart-Shaped Box" reflects the internal conflict, but it doesn't really develop it. And of course it doesn't help that lyrically it is an overloaded, obscure mess, so that even if the emotional aspect of the emotional situation is pretty clear, the situation itself remains murky. By the end of the song there is lots of emotion but it feels solipsistic and without understanding. Maybe this works for some people, and maybe I am asking too much (or the wrong thing) of it, but I don't feel like the song has really worked on its content, the attraction and repulsion don't seem to really interact with each other, the song just lurches from one to the other. Maybe if he could have expanded on the idea of being "forever in debt," or the "priceless advice" or something then I would be more satisfied.

If you want to see a masterful use of soft/loud work, I recommend The Posies' "Please Return It" (of course I do, it's pretty close to my favorite song) for its amazing (no disgrace) building and balancing of tension. The song is about the need (and perils) of reciprocity (of give and take-and returning), and way that the song handles its movement follows a real emotional contour, serving to embody the living, changing tension of a relationship. "Please Return It" does not offer the high energy discharge of the speculative the way some other Posies songs do, but these lines starting at 1:26 contain so much truth and tension in them:

"When you let me live my life,
You didn't do it completely,
But you were discreet.
Like the year I spent comparing me to you
Please return it."

I cannot stress enough the importance of these lines or the profundity of their grasp and expression of a fundamental kind of "internal conflict" in their own way. I have long thought of the overarching theme of much of The Posies' work in terms of an exploration of "lacerated consciousness," a consciousness divided against itself, cut open but still striving to heal. I draw the idea from my readings of German Idealism (particular Hegel) and the idea of the productive negativity (and the movement of thought) that can come from "diremption" (one translation of the German word "Entzweiung").

In "Please Return It" the idea is that all human relationships ideally operate according to a model of reciprocity, that for everything that we give to others we can also as "please return it" and expect our request to be honored. This is certainly a potentially fragile arrangement, and it means that there is a certain vulnerability to human relationships that makes autonomy tenuous. As the song puts it in an earlier line: "When we live the life we live, it's never ours completely, not completely." So, that this arrangement can break down in all sorts of ways comes as no surprise, but what is interesting is what is revealed in the breakdown, namely, how an external division can become an internal one.

From these lines it seems as though the singer escapes from the orbit of someone domineering and controlling (perhaps someone who is all take and no give), but soon learns that such an influence lingers in unexpected ways. The lines suggest that the other party is still responsible ("You didn't do it completely....You were discreet") but suddenly those actions are internal ("Like the year I spent comparing me to you"). The internal division takes the form of an internalization of a certain external standard and an accompanying sense of self-inferiority. The self is torn between what it is and what it thinks it should be, and this tearing is its own doing as an other (it does the other's bidding to itself). In this the situation is a bit like the one I analysed in the "I never did good things..." lines from Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes" insofar as it is a matter of not being able to have a sense of oneself and one's own actions that are really one's own.

But the word "completely" in these lines ("You didn't do it completely") hearkens back to the earlier statement that life is "never ours completely, not completely") and suggests that in an important sense one's actions are never "completely" one's own. This song is the processing of the emotional impact of this fact that we will never escape the tensions and vulnerability that go along with sociality. Obviously there is no getting back the "year I spent comparing me to you," at least not in a literal sense, but there is at least the hope of redeeming it, where a "return" would be finding the "upside," i.e., the point at which you "bring the balance back to you in returning." What would it mean for the other to do this in this case? Given that the singer identifies it as being in the past ("the year I spent") and identifies its problematic part (the time spent "comparing me to you") he has already done the internal work of understanding it. But there is a difference between understanding that something was unhealthy and being free of that thing, and it may be that some kind of recognition from the other might help with that. To have long found oneself lacking in the face of the other, even if you get over that, it would still mean a lot for that other, on the one hand, to genuinely affirm your own worth, and on the other, to perhaps admit the he/she had a hand in creating those feelings of insecurity. This is a high bar and not one I'd expect to see from someone with a poisonous personality since it requires the other side to admit to their own vulnerability, but it is something you should be able to look for in "the certainly of friendship, you can ask, 'Please return it,' bring the balance back to you." Friendship is being able to bear your own laceration along with someone else's.

 (I should also mention the fact that the song makes perhaps the coolest use of the saxophone ever-I am generally opposed to the saxophone, especially in pop music, as it tends to be super boring, but here they are barely even recognizable as such and work amazingly. Live version of this song always lose something because the distorted saxophone sound isn't properly reproduced by guitars.)

The album that "Please Return It" is on, "Amazing Disgrace," came out in 1996, well after the heyday of grunge, and despite being based in Seattle during the whole grunge period they were always on a very different track, and even a grittier album like 1993's "Frosting on the Beater" is up to something quite unlike their contemporaries with, for instance, its spectacular harmonizing ("Solar Sister," I'm looking at you). But from their very beginning The Posies were exploring this theme of :lacerated consciousness." In the next part I will explore this further.