"....Some of them were deeply into drugs, others were unbelievable workaholics. Some were going to singles bars every night. You could see it played out in twenty different ways, but it's the same thing."
We're gonna start the year off with a positive jam.
I mean, not exactly. I just couldn't resist that line. The truth is there's a lot of positivity out there about 2017 - or rather there's relentless negativity about the year that 2016 was, and a desperate belief that 2017 can't get any worse. Mind you, anyone who's seen a sitcom can tell you the phrase "this can't get any worse" is a sure sign everything's about to.
In the past 24 hours, there have been untold eulogies of David Bowie. There have been articles written about what he meant to the countless worlds he affected; music, film, art, the LGBT community, Science Fiction, and just general weirdness. A metric ton of digital ink has been spilled, and while it seems overwhelming, it makes sense. This was a man who transcended boundaries, essentially for a living. Since the late 60s, it seems he never met a line he wasn't willing to cross. He meant a lot of things to a lot of people, and of course he meant something to me as well. I wouldn't be here otherwise. But I'm not a Bowie scholar, or even a particularly devoted acolyte. But on the eve of his death, I think it's appropriate, if nothing else, to appreciate the sheer breadth of an impact the man has had on the world today.
I'll admit, I've been in something of a rut these last couple weeks; not keeping up with habits and practices that I've worked very hard to develop. Writing consistently was one of those habits. There's countless reasons WHY I was in that rut, but frankly that's not really what I talk about on this blog. All that really matters is that I was thoroughly prepared to not write an SPS for this week. And then this happened...
I'm well aware that my song choice this week is not going to garner a lot of new fans. Black Metal is, at its absolute best, a divisive genre, and even beyond the massive barrier for entry, we're opening ourselves to the frightening world of subgenre nomenclature in heavy metal. "Is Deafheaven truly Black Metal," you say? "Maybe they're post-metal?" "What does that even mean?" "No, they're not Metal at all, they're just an indie band pretending to be metal," chimes in the purist. "Have you actually heard them? It's metal!"
The point of all this is that there's a good chance you won't make it through the nine-minute runtime of "Dream House," and if you do there's an even greater chance you won't make it through the full album's winding hour. And while that's fine - it's not for everyone - it's also a shame. Because Sunbather is a masterpiece, and beneath its craggy and off-putting exterior there lurks something poetic and even, dare I say, beautiful.
Do you have a favorite band? A group that stands above the rest, whose discography you know backward and forward, and who you never miss when they're in town? The absolute ne plus ultra of your musical tastes, top of the list, best there ever is, was or will be? If you're like me, the answer is probably "No." And while a dozen music critics just gasped and clutched their pearls, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
For starters, just watch the music video. Normally these posts are all about the song itself, and don't get me wrong - we'll get there. But I spent enough time in film school to appreciate a good music video when I see one, and this one is simply perfect. It takes an amazing joke and then builds on it with style and humor. It avoids that painful one-note nature that's very easy to stumble into when developing sketch comedy, and above all it rides a fine line between parody and earnestness that gives the entire thing an irreverent charm, one that doesn't tear apart what I see as an inherently positive song. Because as mockable as it is, sometimes you do just want to be better. You want to work out, eat right, be nicer and happier and generally more social. And in today's exceedingly hip and ironic world, that's a vulnerable place to be.
Yes, I've posted this song twice in a row. Yes, it only came out on Friday. I don't care. It's been ringing in my head nonstop since I first listened to it, and since then it's been the only song on my weekend playlist. I find myself humming it as I walk around the city, singing tiny snatches of the lyrics. It's possessed me, in the best possible way. And frankly, I wanted to take a week to write about it. Baroness is, if not my favorite band of all time, tied for first, and their story is brilliant and rich and complicated - far bigger than one of these little weekly posts. But a wiser man than me once said something to the effect of 'If you think about something three times a week, you should write about it'. I've thought about this song three times a day since it came out.
Live music, I think, is one of life's great pleasures. I've touched on this idea before, in a previous SPS, talking about Joe Satriani's excellent 'Crowd Chant'. The music connects on a visceral level that you can't find anywhere else, and there's obviously something deeply hard-wired in our brains that lights up when we're a part of a crowd. Having said all that, let's talk about a band I've never actually seen live: Opeth. Wikipedia calls them a Swedish Progressive Death Metal band, and without delving too deeply into the obscure and esoteric world of heavy metal nomenclature, that's pretty accurate, though they've been trending more towards the Progressive than the Death in the last few years. They're incredibly inventive and utterly brilliant, and the above song, an acoustic version of 'Demon the Fall', might be the best example of that.
If you've ever had the misfortune of reading my early fiction, you've probably figured out that I have certain quirks, both in terms of style and plot. I'm honestly not too ashamed of this; most writers have quirks, it's just that once you reach a certain level of success they start calling them 'marks of your distinct voice'. Certain things just click with you, and end up sticking in your brain far longer than anyone expects. Just by way of example, I have always been fascinated by the story of the hero Ulysses, better known as the Greek epic The Odyssey. It's an idea that many people keep coming back to, and each iteration fascinates me - James Joyce's doorstopper novel, the Coen's O Brother Where Art Thou, even Symphony X's 23-minute epic metal track. There's just something about the core concept, built around this deep-seated longing to return home, that speaks to me on a deep, emotional level. It should come as no surprise, then, that Franz Ferdinand's 2009 album, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand, is in my mind the band's single greatest achievement.
I've been listening to this on repeat for the last two weeks, and I've got to say I haven't even approached tired of it yet. If you haven't heard of July Talk - and let's be honest, they're a Canadian indie rock band, you probably haven't - do yourself a favor and track them down. This song's my personal favorite, but Paper Girl, Guns + Ammunition, and Blood + Honey (what's with the plus signs, guys?) are all amazing, and well worth a look. As one internet commenter so eloquently put it, "It's basically a punk rock duet with Tom Waits and Judy Garland."
Their videos are all delightful as well, though admittedly more pure performance pieces than 'Blank Space'-esque narratives. And that's probably for the better; July Talk isn't writing about anything new. Sex, drugs, relationships spiraling out of control - it's all fairly totemic Rock-N-Roll stuff. Even the videos themselves are simple, shot in stark black and white with next to no artifice or directorial touches. But perhaps because of that simplicity, they all come off as that much more earnest, and that much more real. There's a sense that this isn't music for an arena, music that you like and share on Tumblr or Instagram. It's music for 1am, for a dive bar and a glass of whiskey and for maybe doing something a little bit illegal. And sometimes that's just what you need.
“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”
A sommelier can, from a single sip of wine, tell you where the grapes were grown. Not just a general idea, but often a specific vineyard, and, with some potentially dubious cases, the exact location within that vineyard. The wine is truly a product of its birthplace, and it carries within itself the qualities of that place, a marker of the place of time from which it sprung.
In the same way, I think, certain musicians carry markers of where they're from - not necessarily their place of birth, but where the grew up, and where they truly found their home.
I'm finding, more and more, that adult life gets rough: it's important to keep in mind the things that make it worthwhile. The things that bring you joy, peace, or satisfaction. To do anything else is to descend into cynicism and pessimism, to fall victim to the default setting of work-eat-sleep-repeat. As the Hold Steady said, it's important to start things with a positive jam.
Off the bat, this isn't a new song by any means. In fact, it's a decade old at this point, released back when I was a mere Freshman in High School. And it's a song that would have spoken volumes to insecure little Freshman-me, alive with the glory of punk and teenage rebellion. But 10 years and several doses of reality later, I can't get this song out of my head. For starters, it's just plain good: catchy as hell, with a slow build to a final verse that feels triumphant and cathartic. I've never been a massive Say Anything fan, but "...is a Real Boy" is an absolute classic, one of the hidden gems of the early 2000s, lost among the mess of Fall Out Boy, Good Charlotte, and My Chemical Romance.
But good songs don't necessarily stick with you. I like to think that things get stuck in your head for a reason greater than chord progressions (though, who knows, maybe I'm looking for meaning in all the wrong places). But I think what gets me about this song is the simple, emotional honesty of it all. It's in the first line - "Here I am, laid bare, at the end of my rope". That kind of honesty is hard to come by in all the posturing of modern music - it's certainly not something that comes naturally to me. But maybe it's something that should.
It's a punk rock anthem about how he knows that the simple act of writing this song will ruin his chances with Molly, but he goes ahead and does it anyway. Because what else would he do? How could he be anything other than himself?
