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.

One Liners: David Bowie - "Ashes to Ashes"

Sometimes there is a line in a song that really stands out (and I'm talking in a good way, not in a "shape of you" kind of way) and I find myself turning it over in my mind. It may not be the catchiest line, but it has some extra depth which rewards rumination. One such line comes from David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes."

I'm not a huge Bowie fan, but I would say that this is definitely my favorite Bowie song, and there is undoubtedly a lot that could be said about the song as a whole, particularly in terms of how he uses it to reflect upon his own legacy and image. Or you could even just marvel at the angular slap bass line and eerie bleeps and bloops of the synth that open the song, and appreciate how they run through it, giving it a surreal atmosphere. But that is beyond the scope of what I want to address here, I just want to look at this line: “I’m stuck with a valuable friend”

I like this line because of the double meaning. Given the general drugginess of the lyrics, I assume the “valuable friend” is heroine. “Valuable friend” is an interesting substitute for “dear friend,” suggesting both the economic worth of heroine, and also less intimacy and caring than “dear.” Plus, the stuck refers both to being forced to stay with heroine—addicted—as well as the actual delivery method of the drug (stuck with a needle). The punning here reflects the theme of the song as a whole, which is that things can degenerate and become (or perhaps always have been) parodies (or puns) of themselves:

"Ashes to ashes, funk to funky
We know Major Tom's a junkie
Strung out in heaven's high,
hitting an all-time low."

The movement from "funk to funky" reminds the listener that just as funk is a kind of music (the song's groove is itself pretty funky) a funk is also a dejected or low mood, a feeling of fear, and a bad smell, the latter also being one of the primary meanings of "funky." Something catchy and full of dynamism can also be something low and foul just underneath. (And to reference the amazing video, a clown can equally be a figure of fun and terror.) The joke, of course, is that the otherworldly highs reached by astronaut Major Tom (from Bowie's early hit "Space Oddity," and already a drug metaphor) have their corresponding lows.

Ok, I thought this would be a quick examination of one line, but I have to mention one other particularly affecting line that comes at the end of the song:

"I've never done good things,
I've never done bad things,
I never did anything out of the blue."

Thinking about the subject of this song, it seems as though this cannot be accurate. Its pretty hard to avoid doing good or bad things in life (perhaps especially the bad things part if you are a junkie). But the last line helps to contextualize what this might mean: what does it mean to do something "out of the blue?" It means to do something unexpected, something not already predicted, planned, or determined. This could be someone who has lived a totally convention life and has never done anything that wasn't expect of them, but it could equally be someone who is unstoppably drawn by their urges, their desires, or their addictions. The issue thus becomes less about whether the actions that make up one's own life are good or bad, but rather, one's own relation to those actions as their cause (or, more accurately in this case, the lack thereof).

Something as simple as putting the "I" in these lines in bold makes this a little clearer:

"I've never done good things,
I've never done bad things,
I never did anything out of the blue."

For all of the things "I've" done, he is saying, it was never really me who did them, you could practically say that it was the drugs, or society, or whatever, that was responsible for these things happening. Whatever good or bad things I did were not things that I could take credit for as an agent, there was always some other thing pushing me. It doesn't have to be about compulsion (although obviously it can be), sometimes it is enough that there never seemed to be another option, that the authority of those influences were always just taken as a given. If everything you do is about the drugs, or if everything you do is because it's expected, then your actions may come to take on an "alien" character and may not seem like they are really your own.

That is why the particular example of doing something "out of the blue" comes up. To do something out of the blue is like doing something for no reason at all, or, at least, not for a reason determined long in advance, or as a foregone conclusion. It is thus one model of living one's life independently of all of these influences, free to act simply (ha!) as oneself as the situation and your own reaction to it demand. Now, as you may suspect from following my discussions of identity and agency in the other posts on this page, I'm not holding this up as a model of some pure, absolute freedom. I take this example to be just that, an example, but I think it helps to illustrate what Bowie is trying to get at here. 

The Shape of Sentence, or, Yes, How You Say Things Matters: Ed Sheeran "The Shape of You"

So now I'm going to go from raving about an interesting deployment of the pronoun "you" to a really frustrating one in Ed Sheeran's "The Shape of You."

Now I know I'm going against popular taste here, as this song has billions of views on youtube and got an overwhelming amount of radio play, but I just can't stomach it. Most of the song is just unremarkable, but I really hate the central line of the song: "I'm in love with the shape of you." That phrase, "the shape of you," sounds really clunky.

What do I mean by "clunky" ? Well, yes, it is grammatically incorrect, but grammatical correctness is not really that important when it comes to lyrics. There are plenty of songs that mangle grammar and sound good while doing it. But its bad grammar does have something to do with the problem. For one, it just doesn't sound like anything anyone would say. From a grammatical standpoint, we can see that it should be "I'm in love with your shape," or maybe "I'm in love with the shape of your body." The lameness of these two options tells us why Sheeran's version sucks. "I'm in love with your shape" falls flat rhythmically; there is something to the rhythm of two beats followed by the stress on "love" and then another two beats and the stress on "shape," but even still the "of you" just feels rushed. I prefer the similar rhythm as it plays out in the line: "I'm in love with your body"

Contrasting these lines also highlights how unsexy the word "shape" is--its way too abstract and geometrical. We might as well say "I love your outline!" or "I love your profile!" Sure, "I'm in love with your body" is kind of trite and boring, but that didn't stop Sheeran from using it a ton of times too. Plus, part of the reason why I don't like the actual version is it feels incomplete, as if I keep expecting Sheeran to sing "I'm in love with the shape of your body," which feels more normal if perhaps too wordy for a pop song.

I will just trash a few other lines which, if not as prominent as the main offender, are still pretty awful. Consider: "Your love was handmade for somebody like me." That's just a weird thing to say, the combination of specific customization ("handmade") with vague generality ("for somebody like me") is just an odd way to go when talking about love. It's the kind of thing you might hear in hawking some product: "You there, sir, try this, this love was handmade for somebody like you!"

Also, let's not forget the awkward phrase "Grab on my waist and put that body on me"-shouldn't it be "Grab onto my waist and put your body on mine," or at least "put that body onto mine" ? (Or is there a corpse in this song that she wants to hide under: "Quick, put that body on me!" I know I'm quibbling a bit here, but these are just really bizarre choices.

Let me finish with this gem:

"I'm in love with the shape of you
We push and pull like a magnet do"

It's always cute when wordsmiths decide to get fancy and go all rhymey, but that's a terrible line. "We push and pull like magnets" is still stupid but at least it is grammatical (the other easy way out that keeps the rhyme is "We push and pull like magnets do" even though the "do" is totally unnecessary). Both options also avoid raising questions about how two people are like one magnet. Is there an attraction-repulsion thing going on between them and other objects? At least if they were attracted like magnets they would be together, but I guess you don't get the vaguely suggestive "push and pull" part. Maybe Ed Sheeran has been getting lessons on magnets from the ICP.

There isn't too much else I really have to say about the song. It's a simple song in a way that The Shins' "Simple song" isn't.

Semi-Current Song Obsession: The Shins - "Simple Song"

A few months ago I was driving alone at night when this song came to the top of my playlist:

for quite awhile afterwards this song, and indeed much of the album its from ("Port of Morrow") were on pretty heavy rotation for me. Before I get too far into what I think clicked with it for me, I'll provide some background.

I have enjoyed The Shins' music for a few years now. I checked out their first two albums because they fit into the general mould of harmonic pop that I enjoy. However, it was never a "Garden State" situation where The Shins were going to "change my life," especially with the first two albums which I find a little too low key despite their pleasant twistedness (The Posies do that better anyway-and I remember an interview where one of the Posies complains that their moment never quite came but yet The Shins broke out a few years later). Anyway, I enjoy their third album "Wincing the Night Away" more because it is a departure from that style, but even now I still haven't spent that much time on it.

But while sitting in heavy traffic about a year ago I was listening to the radio (to give my wife a brief respite from a continual stream of Posies, Mountain Goats, New Pornographers, Neko Case, etc.) and I heard a really catchy song that sounded like The Shins. I remembered enough of the lyrics to look it up later and it turned out to be "Name For You" off of their latest album, "Heartworms" (it may not have even been released by that point). I didn't really get into the album until the end of the summer, but it really took off for me in the fall and there was a period when it was on my playlist practically nonstop. "Painting a Hole" is wacky and amazing with some serious groove, "Cherry Hearts" is so great to sing along with (if no one else has to hear me); there are a ton of stand-outs.

But "Port of Morrow," well, I gave it enough of a cursory listen to pick out the highlights like "Simple Song," but it wasn't until that winter drive that I started to get into it. It too took hold, especially "Its Only Life," "No Way Down," and "40 Mark Strasse," but "Simple Song" above all.

In some respects I have laden this post with biographical information because the song is in many respects as simple as its title suggests (although I actually think the biographical part is good to have because I don't add bands to my musical "inner circle" all that often so it is worth documenting). The sentiment is laid out as clearly as the thesis statement in a high school essay:

"This is just a simple song, to say what you done
I told you about all those fears, and away they did run."

The song is about the love and gratitude that the singer feels for his beloved and the way that she, among other things, helped him  conquer his fears and turn his life in a positive direction.

But I hesitate to say that things are really as simple as all that. Most songs are susceptible to being reduced to a quick description (hint: you've got a way better than 50/50 chance if you say "love" and don't specify whether the love goes well or not) without their subject matter being at all simple (to say nothing of their specific treatment of that subject matter).

The song actually takes a fairly unusual perspective in presenting a retrospective view of a happy, successful love. This isn't a song about wanting someone out of reach, or trying to convince someone to get with you, or a love gone wrong, or even just how wonderful the beloved is. It's close the that last one, but the difference is that many songs about the beloved just focus on the object, the beloved, whereas this one is about how the beloved changed and improved the singer's life, hence those lines about how "I told you about all those fears, and away they did run."

The lines that come next are where things get complicated (and interesting). They go as follows:

"You sure must be strong,
When you feel like an ocean being warmed by the sun"

Now, I think the speaker is here praising the beloved (the "you") for being strong, and by virtue of that strength, for making the speaker "feel like an ocean being warmed by the sun." The "you feel" in this line is thus not a feeling the beloved feels, but a feeling that the beloved causes in others. This second "you" thus occupies a complicated position, where it treats the beloved as an object, but as an active rather than merely passive one. The "you" in "when you feel" has a similar function as the "you" in "to say what you done"  earlier in the song.

It's a subtle point, and maybe I'm making too much out of it, but it seems to me that this construction is one way to elevate the "beloved" beyond the passivity usually designated by the term in order to give her strength and influence its due. As an addendum to this point, I just want to point out how enjoyable the pick-up in tempo is after he sing "being warmed by the sun," it's a simple, triumphant kind of pleasure. The strident strumming (along with the swirling synth) just crashes over the listener like the waves of a sin-warmed ocean.

But in thinking about all of this I find myself wondering about the "you" in the chorus:

"I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone
Don't go thinking you gotta be tough and be/bleed/play/plea (?) like a stone
Could be there's nothing else in lives so critical
As this little home."

I think that the "you" in the first two lines of the chorus is a rhetorical "you," rather than the beloved. I say this partly because of the "strength" of the beloved, she does not seem to be in any danger from going it alone or trying to put on a tough face. I also say it because the lead-in "I know" seems to signal a recounting of general advice rather than some kind of direct description, plus, the phrases themselves are curiously generic ("go it alone," "gotta be tough"). If anything, the chorus sounds like the speaker recounting advice he has received (perhaps from the beloved) and that he has had to learn to put into practice. Such a shift wouldn't be that unusual because the chorus is, at least to an extent, a separate part of the song, so it can play that dramatic role.

And speaking of drama, I would alike to point out the beautiful final lyrics of the song:

"Remember walking a mile to your house
Aglow in the dark
I made a fumbling play for your heart
And the ax drove the spark

You wore a charm on the chain that I stole special for you
Love's such a delicate thing that we do
With nothing to prove
Which I never knew

I do like the phrase "aglow in the dark," it is a romantic image that taps into the sun imagery and also leads into the clever bit about the ax (the ax image captures the endearing inexperience -"a fumbling play"- of the speaker, since it is only an ax that misses its target that causes a spark). But is the (nearly) final line, "Love's such a delicate thing that we do" that really resonates. Love is something active and shared ("something we do"), and like the complicated positioning of the"you" in this song, it is sometimes very subtle and delicate. So much for a simple song.

Speculative titles: Pat Benatar - "Hell is for children" (Part two)

Just in case you didn't read Part One of this post and didn't watch the lyric video of the album version of "Hell is for children," or even if you did and have forgotten how excellent a song it is (and how great Pat Benatar is), then check out this amazing live version.

Ok, so I ended Part One with a discussion of the inappropriateness of the advice "forgive and forget" when applied to child abuse. The idea was that while being able to "forgive and forget" is nice if you are able to do so in a healthy way, the nature and circumstances of child abuse in particular render that ability problematic, to say the least. "Forgive and forget" thus becomes one more mechanism by which abusers can get away with their awful deeds and by which the categories of good and bad, love and hate, get distorted, and with them goes the language we use to talk about them. Benatar provides examples of this with lines like:

"Be daddy's good girl and don't tell mommy a thing
Be a good boy and you'll get a new toy."

To us, the context warps the phrases "daddy's good girl" and "Be a good boy" into something horrifying, and yet to the children, who don't know any different, these meanings are normal. This is literally a warping of what "good" and "bad" mean. This connection between ignorance and the normalization of suffering is, as I said before, part of what makes hell particularly suited to children, i.e., for them.

But this way of looking at the issue also opens the door to the other idea implicit in the phrase "hell is for children," namely, that the very idea of hell (the standard-issue Christian version in particular) is for children in the sense that it is essentially a childish notion insofar as it is enmeshed in the "developmentally-stunted" concepts of love and pain that we see in the song.

Now, without getting into discussions of the difference between "Hell," "Gehenna," "Hades," "Sheol," or "Tartarus" (to name a few), or with the modern attempt to turn hell into some kind of metaphor for "a state of utter alienation from God," what I'm talking about when I say "hell" is the idea of an afterlife in which the dead are punished with eternal torment. The most common version of this is the cartoonish picture of lakes of fire and brimstone populated by red devils wielding pitchforks. This idea didn't come out of nowhere, it has occupied a prominent position in Western Christian consciousness for centuries. While people nowadays may not endorse this version of hell, and some may agree that it is a bit childish, the idea behind it, namely, eternal punishment in the afterlife, is still going strong. And it is this core idea, not simply the fire and pitchforks deployment of it, that I ultimately take issue with.

Why is hell for children? I don't think I'm covering any new ground (I've previously written quite a bit on Byron's particular concern with this idea) when I say that is is because it is tied to the idea of an all-powerful and ever-loving God. As soon as this combination of attributes results in eternal torment, you know that something is messed up. Either God isn't really all-powerful, so he can't prevent their being a hell (resulting in a pretty lame God), or his definition of "love" is just as twisted as the one Benatar sings about. Infinite love and infinite pain should not be one and the same.

To me, these contradictions stem from the fact that the idea of belongs to a childish worldview. For one, I see it as an ideological tool to control people's behavior: threaten people with eternal punishment to keep them from doing what you don't want them to. In this regard hell is for people who are being treated as children, who must be kept in line by force and by fear.

But hell is also for children in the sense that the idea appeals to people who, for whatever reason, are stuck in what could be said to be a position of ethical immaturity. For these people the idea of eternal punishment is appealing because it provides an outlet for resentment. The justice (or revenge) that you cannot seem to get in this world can supposedly be had in the next, and there is supposedly comfort in that. But the idea of hell stems from a much crueler time, and it seems to me that we can no longer say that torture is compatible with justice. We need to have a more grown up concept of love and justice, ones not purely based personal satisfaction ("I hate him and want to see him punished").

Now, in criticizing a topic like hell there is of course plenty of room for objections like "What you are describing is too literal, what we mean is something more metaphorical like 'a state of utter alienation from God.'"

There are a couple things I have to say to such an objection:

First, even if you don't personally believe in that version of hell, there are plenty of people who do, both now and throughout the idea's long history. And even to those who are far more nuanced in their understanding of hell, I would still ask what role the concept plays for them and for God?

Are you just trying to rationalize and sanitize a concept that really has no place any more, and ought to be left behind with many of the other cruel things we have outgrown?

Do you need to think of an afterlife at all? And why does the afterlife have to be divided into winners and losers?

Second, I would also like to take a step back and consider what may lie behind defensive objections like "Well that's not what I believe in." There is undoubtedly a recognition that I judge this idea of hell to be bad, and with that comes the assumption that because I think it is bad I also think that anyone who believes in it is bad. It is true that I think this idea of hell is bad, but with regard to the second assumption, it's complicated.

To a certain extent, I think how we judge such a matter it depends on what you do with that belief. As the whole discussion in part one of the development of our intellectual and emotional capacities suggests, we are not wholly in change of what we think and feel and believe; the circumstances of our development influence us in ways we cannot entirely control. There is some truth to the excuse "They can't help it, that's how they were brought up": I don't think it is true for everyone to the same degree or for all qualities equally, but I think we can recognize that there are ways of growing up that certainly stunt one's possibilities for change and growth and improvement. Couple that with the fact that (as I address in this post) it is not so easy to change one's beliefs, that they are not simply ideas that we have intentionally chosen. So no, I do not think that anyone is a bad person simply because they believe in hell. Or, at least I don't think of them as a bad person in an uncomplicated way--I suspect most of us are bad people in a variety of complicated ways. I know I certainly am.

As I said briefly, it all depends on what you do with it. For those people for whom a belief in hell serves as a goad to live a good life, well, I'd prefer it if you could live a good life without that fear being a factor in your life both for your emotional well-being and for your moral well-being too. I say the latter because (not uncontroversially) I think that doing something good out of fear is less good than doing it for more positive reasons. Without trying to rank these positive reasons, I think I can at least say that it is more "ethically mature" to do something good because you like doing good things than because you are afraid of bad things happening. "Hell is for children," in this sense, means that hell is for people who have not yet developed to the point where they can do good things on their own, for their own sake.

Speculative Titles: Pat Benatar "Hell is for children" (Part One)

I'm going to read this song somewhat against the grain, or at least to extrapolate beyond the usual interpretations of it. The most obvious reading of this song is that it is about the horrors of child abuse (not, as some trolls--or genuine fools--claim, that Pat Benatar hates children and wants them to go to hell). The main idea expressed in the line "hell is for children" is that the combination of innocence and dependence/vulnerability that children embody makes it particularly apt to use hell as the analogue for the special kind of torment that they experience in such situations. This is a powerful idea and I endorse Benatar's handling of it in this way, and part one of this post will be devoted to cashing out this idea. But, in part two I want to read the expression "hell is for children" in another way, and say that precisely because the concept of hell and all that it represents is so beastly and awful, that the idea is "for children" in the sense of being childish.

Now before I go any further, because child abuse is an emotionally charged subject that has had devastating effects upon those whom it has touched, I should note that I do not speak from experience here and I do not claim any particular authority on the matter or claim to speak for anyone. What follows are basically theoretical reflections: I speak in a general way of experiences that I have only heard reports of, and the best I can do is to think and use my imagination to understand the phenomenon.

That being said, one particularly ghastly element of child abuse is surely the fact that it doesn't simply do immediate damage to the child (though of course it does that in spades), but it actually damages the child's very process of emotional and psychological maturation and everything that comes from that. Because children are still learning what it means to love and be loved while they are being abused, and often are abused by the very people who are supposed to teach it/model it to them, their torment has the "special" internal component (I say "special" to differentiate it from the fact that all torment has a crucial internal component) of actually twisting the concept of love in its very formation. Benatar is sensitive to this fact, writing that:

Forgive and forget
All the while
Love and pain become one and the same
In the eyes of a wounded child

The idea that "Love and pain become one and the same / In the eyes of a wounded child" is crucial, and she will later sing that "It's all so confusing, this brutal abusing, / They blacken your eyes and then apologise." It is confusing for children, and that confusion goes deep to become a kind of confusion of concepts--love and pain. At such a level, the potential for damage is tremendous, as these twisted lesson have the potential to infect a person's entire capacity to enter into loving relationships with others. (I say "have the potential" because not everyone will be affected by abuse in the same way; I am telling one story, the one that Benatar also tells. If you have been abused but this is not your story, I hope that is because your story went a better way.)

Related to this is Benatar's inclusion of the nostrum "Forgive and forget," a form of advice wholly unsuited to children who lack the emotional capability to properly forgive. I am not disputing the importance of the capability to overcome (or leave behind or comes to grips with or however you wish to understand it) injury or hurt captured by that phrase, nor do I think Benatar is. No, the problem is that child abuse seems to stand in the way of developing the very capability to "forgive and forget" in the first place, at least to do so in a healthy way. After all, what I think of as genuine forgiveness involves coming to terms with one's injury, and I don't think most children have the emotional resources to do so. This is because of the general emotional immaturity of children, and is likely made worse by the damage that abuse does to their capability to eventually develop the kinds of emotional resources necessary to ever "come to terms" with it. After all, I think Benatar is trying to say, without a healthy understanding of what love and trust are supposed to be, how could one forgive?

In addition, there is the fact that children who have been abused may not have the external resources--like existential safety and independence--to give them the luxury of coming to a genuine place of forgiveness. Likely many children will "forgive" their abusers, but not because they have have attained a higher perspective from which to overcome the wrong that was done to them, but rather because they desire love and approval from the very person who is abusing them, and because they depend on them. Perhaps even more likely is that in the course of "forgiving" their abuser most children will really just do their best to forget what happened, while nonetheless carrying it with them their whole lives in some form or another. (This last statement is not meant as an endorsement or denial of repressed memories, a matter that I have not formed any definite judgment about, nor is it meant to consign all victims of abuse to a condition of permanent and defining victimhood. Rather, I just want to express the idea that one does lightly overcome abuse in the blithe way suggested by the expression "forgive and forget" in this context.)

The point of Benatar's inclusion of a phrase like "forgive and forget" then, may very well be a demonstration of its very inadequacy. If hell is for children, part of the reason for this hellishness may be because neither forgiveness nor forgetting are possible. But as I indicated at the beginning of this post, that is only one side of what there is to say about the idea that "hell is for children," next, I will look at an idea that lurks in the song in parallel, as it were.

More Perils of Indeterminateness: Our Lady Peace-"Somewhere Out There"

Thinking over my previous post, I'm less than confident that I've got the meaning of "The End of Medicine." The song is pretty oblique, but that's not necessarily a defect. Despite my interest in those that do, songs don't have to have a clear, discursive meaning, or even just one (or one overarching) meaning to be good, and many resist anything approaching a full elucidation of whatever they do mean. But that does not mean that anything goes: cliche and triteness are as bad in songs as they are anywhere else. The most vexing things to me though, are when the lyrics to a song are incredibly vague and indeterminate, as if the songwriters thought that evoking the hazy impression of an emotion were enough. I can't get behind a song that is simply "I love you baby because you are beautiful" because there's nothing to hold onto there, either in terms of the love or the beauty. If it's "I know I hurt you but I still love you" scenario, then at least there's some content to the emotion. Now I know I've gone over this territory before, but there are ideas worth reiterating, and there are distinctions worth reinforcing, such as how vagueness is different than ambiguity: the latter means it is difficult to choose between specific meanings, the former that it is difficult to pin down anything specific meaning at all (the distinction between indeterminateness and indeterminacy follows similar lines). 
 
Now, I say this as a preamble to bashing Our Lady Peace's song "Somewhere Out There." Like so many Canadian teens in the 90's I was a fan of Our Lady Peace (and I do still like their early work); they could rock, their lyrics, if somewhat inscrutable, were still interesting and the vocal style of their singer, Raine Maida, if unorthodox, was capable of delivering an honest and powerful delivery of emotion. That might be a lot of commas and ifs, but they were one of the first bands I got into when I was getting into music and they were the first concert I ever went to on my own (unaccompanied by my parents that is, I went with friends), so they hold a special place in my life for that as well. Their first album, Naveed, still holds up as a really good post-grunge rock album, and their next two albums had some great moments too. Their fourth album, Spiritual Machines, is where things started to get a little dicey (in retrospect, their interest in Ray Kurzweil, faux techno-prophet, on that album says that something isn't right) and their work after that has been, as far as I can tell, a steady slide in radio rock mediocrity. The song that I want to talk about now, "Somewhere Out There," fits into that latter period.

Now, given my dislike for vagueness and indeterminateness the title admittedly looks like a bad sign. But I'm actually not going to trash that aspect too much, the song works with themes of outer space and the alienation of distance (it might be a drug thing, there is an early line about them being "strung out," though its not really developed) that makes that vagueness appropriate, although still way too overwrought. No, my beef if with a particular image from the chorus that just gets stuck in my craw every time I hear it. Here's the chorus:

You're falling back to me,

You're a star that I can see, yeah

I know you're out there

Somewhere out there

You're falling out of reach

Defying gravity, yeah

I know you're out there

Somewhere out there

What I don't understand is the movement being described here. At first this person is "falling back to me" but then they are "falling out of reach," and this second falling is "defying gravity." I suspect that the two directions to the falling (back to and also out of reach) is just a matter of muddled writing, but it is the relation between falling and defying gravity that I find really puzzling. Maybe there is some arcane principle of physics I am missing? If you are orbiting around something and you escape from its orbit does that count as falling? It always seemed to me that falling was something largely passive on the part of the one falling and involved being pulled towards a gravitational centre, whereas escaping orbit is something active and requires a force opposing the gravitational one. If this person is falling out of reach because they are being pulled by some other force (say, drugs, if that's what's going on here) then they aren't really defying gravity, they are succumbing to it from another direction. Yeah, it drives me crazy because it's not thought out at all, it must have sound poetic and that was enough. Seriously, if Our Lady Peace wants to get a clue about what it means to defy gravity they should do a little more research, there are better songs that explore the relation between liberation and the defiance of gravity.

The Speculative Voice (Ken Stringfellow's "Shittalkers!" redux and The New Pornographers "The End of Medicine")

In my previous post on Ken Stringfellow's song "Shittalkers!" I glossed over some of the content of the song in order to discuss its emotional tenor, but now I want to return to the final section of the song to highlight something else. In claiming some kind of speculative content to these songs, that is, some sort of philosophical reflection upon the fundamental features of human life, I have largely neglected any discussion of the form that this content takes. To a certain extent this is because there is no preset way it has to be, although either a harmony or an extreme disjunction between form and content makes for the most interesting scenario. With regard to their harmony, I would like to look at a style that I think is particularly fitting as the embodiment of a mind reflecting upon itself and its conditions. I'll start with "Shittalkers!" because it is freshish.

As I noted in that previous post, Stringfellow sings in a couple of different tempos in "Shittalkers!". There is the first section which is sung but at a slower pace, and then there is the much fasterr chorus ("Back when you started....."), and then there is the second main section ("I got news for this town..."), which was my main focus previously and which is slow to the point to being more declaimed then sung. Then there is a return to the faster tempo chorus, which then continues on at the same pace into a new and final verse. Here are (as far as I can make out) the lyrics to that final section:

          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

Stringfellow's delivery of these lines is impressive--from the chorus onward he is singing at a fast pace, maintaining the emotional intensity of his delivery while navigating some very tricky lines: the double f's of "flicker" and "fame" (and the thwarted expectation that it will be a flame that flickers, not fame), the rhyming of "game" and "fame," the half rhyme of "absolute" first with "cutest" (but he toys with us there with cute at bit before turning it into cutest and adding that little trill with "eyes") and then a double half rhyme (i'm not sure that's a term but oh well) with "obsolete" and of course, "immolation" (not a word you here in pop songs often) with "defamation" (also not a particularly common one). If you can gauge the complexity (or perhaps the fecundity) of a series of lines by the number of parenthetical remarks required to explain it, then these ones certainly rank well. And that makes Stringfellow's rapid-fire delivery, bouncing from line to line, even more impressive. I'm not sure exactly how to describe it, but I see a certain kinetic quality to the progression through these lines, as if the lines themselves possessed a form of internal self-propulsion, bouncing off each other. I think that, in the best cases, this happens on both the level of form and content. In the case of "Shittalkers!" we can see both: the aural links between the various final lines, along with the deployment of the distinctions between innocence and pretense, defamation and fame. Indeed, the unpacking of a concept or the articulation of a distinction provides an excellent pivot or joint (esp. given the connection between articulation and jointure) on which lines can turn, furthering their "propulsion."

The notion of a thought's "internal self-propulsion," as it were, is an eminently speculative notion, and lines that generate that kind of impression through the energy of their delivery and internal relationships seem to me to be particularly appropriate as vehicles for speculative thought, and even where the speculative content itself is lacking, the kind of imaginative capability that they demonstrate itself has speculative worth. And something like this doesn't have to be limited to music either, it should not be surprising that two of my favourite TV shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pushing Daisies, both feature intelligent and playful dialogue at a rapid-fire pace, managing to balance humour and pathos in a rare and delightful way. As a side note (in a blog full of side notes), the two shows also both tackle the subject of what it would mean to come back from the dead, and do so in genuine and unflinching ways, and that itself is a particularly speculative topic (and speculative in a variety of ways too).

Because this is a bit of an airy notion, one no doubt grounded as much in my own musical and intellectual preferences as anything, let me provide another example, the song "The End of Medicine" by The New Pornographers.

As a kind of supergroup including the ever-excellent Neko Case, and with a lot of the song-writing duties divided between Carl Newman and Dan Bejar, one of the specialities of the The New Pornographers is crafting immaculately upbeat rock songs with great hooks and harmonies. Their first album, Mass Romantic, was a real breakout critical darling, and it is full of (nearly) unbridled energy, and I am tempted to pick a song like "The Body Says No" as a great example of what that energy could do. However, because of that "(nearly)" I am going to give props to their not quite-as-well-regarded second album Electric Version, which takes that energy and hones it to a fine edge. (And as a further side note I actually think their third album, Twin Cinema, is their best, but Electric Version is most illustrative of the particular quality I want to discuss here.)
The lyrics are here, and they are delivered in a kind of rapid-fire style with one almost bouncing off the other:

The angel cries, "You bastard!"
As we analyze the accent
So look out, you rock 'n' rollers

Over forty million served
And that's a record for the master
It stood forever after

So are we, are we, are we, are we facing
The end of all, of all the drugs we're lacing
With common sense and courtesy
And other things we thought would be the end of us but now
They won't allow us our intentions

Oh, the mother of invention
It's her pleasure to repeat with feeling:
Are we, are we, are we, are we facing
The end of all the medicine we're taking?

Somewhere in the system
There's an open-ended list
Of all the lies we tell
Unblinking, thinking
What could we be living?
Is it life
Or is it even in the realm of possibility?
You see it when you're missing
Who you came to see, is this thing
Even on and on and on?

Are we, are we, are we, are we facing
The end of all the medicine we're taking?

There are a couple of things to notice off the bat. First of all, there is a lot of play with language in the appropriation of various sayings and catchphrases: "over forty million served"; "the mother of invention"; "repeat with feeling" and "is this thing even on?" Second, there is a definite concern with repetition, both in the taking of medicine (we rarely ever just a drug once), the forty million servings, the "pleasure to repeat with feeling" and also the many "are we" 's happening throughout (plus the "is this thing even on and on and on." And third, I've made at least one change to the lyrics: it's a grammatical thing, but from small things big things can come.

Most people put a question mark at the end of the lines "The end of all, of all the drugs we're lacing" in the third stanza (and maybe that's how the lyrics appearing in the liner notes, I don't know having long since abandoned cds), and I can see why they do since that line does sound like it ends with a question given the rising intonation at the end. However, I've left it without one because I don't think that the question ends there, being simply about whether they are facing the end of medicine. The "with" that starts the next line logically follows the previous line--it is all of the drugs they are "lacing with common sense and courtesy," not simply the end of all the drugs they are lacing (especially since that leaves the question hanging about what they are lacing). But there is also the possibility that the third line ("with common sense and courtesy") actually modifies the first one, so that they are facing the end of medicine with common sense and courtesy. In either case, the issue is not just that the end of medicine may be at hand, but of how one faces this end and understands how it came about.
And I think this also opens up a fuller understanding of just what the song is about, which I see as an exploration of how a compulsive practice, say, drug-taking (perhaps a stand-in for any pleasurably repetitive habit, including music-making, "look out you rock n' rollers"), can change and develop out of itself by way of some kind of internal process. The idea is basically contained in these lines that I've been agonizing over:

          So are we, are we, are we, are we facing

          The end of all, of all the drugs we're lacing
          With common sense and courtesy
          And other things we thought would be the end of us but now
          They won't allow us our intentions

Because of casual changes that they made (like introducing the "grown up" qualities of common sense and courtesy into their pleasures) the subjects of this song find themselves alienated from their earlier intentions. Perhaps without even realizing it, they have become different people in the sense that they have embraced qualities and practices that their earlier selves explicitly rejected.
The practice has evolved, potentially evolved out of itself, and this is an ambiguous thing. If the end of medicine (as both its goal and the actual finishing point) is health, then it is a good thing. Whether we are talking recreational or medicinal drugs, it seems to me that drugs serve as a sign that something is not right. In the case of medicine, something is wrong with the body that needs to be rectified, and in the case of recreational drugs, there is something lacking in the life that the drugs supplement, or failing that, in the case of particularly addictive drugs, that level of dependence is just plain bad. (Now, some will no doubt claim that I am being too moralistic in my treatment of recreational drugs, and that's fine, there's an argument to be made there, but I take the position that most recreational drugs are a scourge.) The final full stanza can be read as a realization of the problems of repetition:

Somewhere in the system
There's an open-ended list
Of all the lies we tell
Unblinking, thinking
What could we be living?
Is it life
Or is it even in the realm of possibility?
You see it when you're missing
Who you came to see, is this thing
Even on and on and on?

I think these lines capture the numbing (and dumbing) effect of repetition--it is easy to do and say and think the same thing over and over again until they lose all meaning apart from the repetition itself. Life does become a lie that we just keep telling ourselves until we take it as the truth, until some sudden break in the routine, some unexpected absence, shows us the cracks in our lifestyle and makes us wonder of our lives, "is this even on?"

Of course, I said that this whole change was ambiguous, and it could be that the end of medicine, and common sense and courtesy, are themselves bad things. This final stanza can also be read as a diagnosis of the levelled-down, comfortable bourgeois existence that so many people trade their young pleasures. The repetition that turns life into a lie is not a matter of pleasure, but of respectability. The fun, manic energy of the song suggests that the band is on this side (and it would be just like me to go against it with the moralistic side). And in this regard I should mention the great guitar line that riffs off of the melody of the song. Starting at 1:55 and going basically until the song is done, this riff teases the listener, suggesting resolution at a number of moments before continuing on, keeping us anticipating the end of the song, the end of pleasure, the end of medicine.