The Darker Half

DC, November 2009, 1,225 words

Last weekend I went up to the north of England to see two married friends of mine called Olly and Charlie, who recently moved up there to a city called Sheffield. I have written about both of them before, they are two of my best friends in the world, and something we’ve always had in common is a love of Halloween. This festival hasn’t traditionally been celebrated in England but we’ve always loved it, and have tried to ensure that whatever we are doing we celebrate it together every year. For Charlie, Halloween is doubly important as it coincides with what is for her a major religious festival. She is a very spiritual person but not one who feels comfortable with any of the major modern religions, so she pursues her own brand of neopaganism, choosing to glorify ancestors and the power of nature and the Earth. In her system, the end of October marks the festival of Samhain, or “summer’s end”. Samhain marks the passage from summer (or the “lighter half” of the year) to autumn and winter.

While I was with them, I was fortunate enough to be allowed to sit on a small ceremony that Charlie was having to mark Samhain. As part of this, Charlie asked us to write down on a piece of paper one thing that we wish to continue doing in the following part of the year, and one thing that we would like to “leave behind” as the seasons change. We then rolled the papers up and burned them in a candle flame, with the burning formally marking the transition from one stage of life to the next. This seemed to perfectly capture the sense that many of us get at this time of year, as the leaves fall from the trees and the days get darker for winter – that just as nature is changing, somehow so are we.

Given how powerful this feeling can be, it’s not surprising that many artists have chosen to incorporate it into their work. There are myriad paintings and photographs that try to capture the tipping point between the lighter and dark halves, and many songs have been written about it. Some of them are quite literal, attempting simply to capture the beautiful yet haunting quality of this particular time and the feelings that it engenders. However, others use the changing seasons as a metaphor that allows them explore issues of change in life and sentiment. There have been two examples of this in 2009, with the onset of autumn explored both by 1990s rock survivors Third Eye Blind (3EB) and spiky post-pop-punkers Taking Back Sunday (TBS). The songs are fascinating to listen to together as they capture perfectly the different ways in which we can be impacted by nature and the Earth.

3EB, in their song Summer Town, have written an elegy to times past, and to things swept away as the clock rolls forward. The central theme of the song is our frequent quest to hang onto the those times in our lives that we come to identify as perfect, or as close to perfection as we get – times that inevitably have a limited lifespan. Singer Stephan Jenkins talks fondly of an “old beach house, where we stood outside and sang out loud”, and how he “remembers the time that we drew a crowd and / I told you everything I knew in a manic rushing line”. Most of all, he wants the audience for his narration to know that “you gave me more than you took from me” – but therein is the problem. Whatever time he is recalling it is firmly in the past tense, with time having moved on since. Indeed, he records what changes have happened in detail, ranging from wistful remembrance (“Hey! Where did everybody go? / Everyone I know has blown the coast”) to desperate sadness (“’cause after Halloween / everything starts fading / I’m losing everyone / I go down like the sun”). However, Jenkins is not so self-absorbed as to assume that he’s the only one who feels this way, noting repeatedly that “you know what I mean”, and proposing a joint way forward, suggesting that “last summer is done / can we find another one? / Find another one?”.

In contrast, TBS very much pick up on the other side of the Samhain feeling, the desire to leave things in the past and move on, to put distance between yourself and difficult or troubling times. In contrast to the more reflective, nostalgic vibe of “Summer Town”, their own “Summer, Man” is a spiteful kiss-off to a season and all it brought. The specific object of the venom is never made explicit (though speculation has suggested that it could be about lead singer Adam Lazarra’s ex-wife, or the former TBS guitarist Fred “The Colour Fred” Mascherino), but that doesn’t matter – we can all identify regardless. We have all been through times or met people that we’d rather forget. “Summer, Man” seems to be trying to fast forward time rather than rewind it, to skip “June until September, three months to December”. Not only does the song express no nostalgia for the past, it actively denies that any such feeling should be reflected on a hard time, with Lazarra noting sarcastically that “let’s have a talk about the good times / oh boy, you were always giving in”. Any distance that can be put between present and past is encouraged, with Lazarra stating with a sense of relief that “the summer is over and I doubt / I doubt I’ll be seeing you around” – indeed, the past has already begun to fade from a vivid experience to a “black and white type” about which much is indistinct but the venom remains vivid.

The differing thematic content of the songs is embodied in the music as well as the lyrics. To support their narrative 3EB opted for quite a laid-back strummed tune with a campfire-singalong vibe. This low-fi sound complements the imagery of the song perfectly – you can almost hear the floorboards creaking when Stephan Jenkins songs about the “old beach house”. When taken together the music and lyrics transport you to your own version of the place that Jenkins has in his mind, and you come away knowing and understanding exactly what he went through. At the opposite end of the spectrum, TBS go hard on “Summer, Man”, which is a real turned-up-to-11 jam. The song passes in a headlong rush forward, as if the band is trying to accelerate time. The drums clatter round and over each other and guitars jab and spar, until the end of the song. Suddenly, just as things are drawing to a close, all of the instruments lock into a chugging rhythm, creating a sense that life is returning to normal after the chaos of the preceding season.

In a way, it’s nice to have another reminder that artists have the same preoccupations that we do, that they also struggle with the adjustment from the lighter half to the darker half. It’s no stretch to imagine that there are singers and songwriters, artists and directors, people of all kinds sitting in their living rooms and studies, thinking about the coming of winter and, just maybe, burning their own rolled-up papers in a Samhain flame.

He Did It All For The Tony

DC, 29^th October 2009, 1,575 words including footnotes

The fact that a theatrical musical is being written about the lives and careers of Run-DMC will probably only appeal to three types of people: serious hip-hop heads, the conspiracy theorists who think that Jam Master Jay was killed by the FBI, and serious potheads. I’m not sure which of those camps I fall into, but I found this news totally fascinating. During the past few years I have been vaguely aware of the trend of turning the back catalogues of musical acts into stage shows. In London, where I live, we have been offered the chance to see “songbook shows” about Abba (“Mamma Mia”), Queen (“We Will Rock You”), Blondie (“Desperately Seeking Susan”) and many others. However, these shows all seemed aimed at an older generation of music fans, and as such didn’t hold much interest for me. Plus, by all accounts the majority of them were awful - but when I read about the Run-DMC plans my immediate reactions were “that would be awesome” and “I really think that their songs and story might work as a musical”. This got me thinking… what is it that makes a songbook show successful and satisfying? And why do some shows fail despite boasting fantastic bodies of song, while others get by despite the underlying music being inherently sketchy[1]?

After a very serious scientific investigation consisting of me chatting with friends, watching the first 10 minutes of “Mamma Mia” before being overcome with concern about the future of the human race, and pondering the aforementioned Jam Master Jay death mystery, I think I’ve come up with three broad rules. Follow these, and your songbook show will at least draw a crowd proportional in size to the popularity of the band that you base it on[2]. Fail to observe them, and your all-singing, all-dancing mash-up of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the musical stylings of Vanilla Ice will probably never make it to Broadway…

Rule 1: The group you select must actually have good songs. Obvious, but we all have a band that on a rational level we know really sucks, but are inexplicably attached to anyway. So while a Run-DMC show might work, a Cobra Starship one probably won’t. You don’t want to hire a 50-person chorus just to have them sing that weird backing vocal from “Good Girls Go Bad”.

Rule 2: The artist should have songs that vary in mood and tone. A good musical has to have different types of song if it is to work – the crowd-pleasing hands in the air numbers, the ballads, the introspective jams. With all due respect to Soulja Boy, an entire show of party jams or braggadocious bitches n’ bling tunes would get boring pretty quickly[3].

Rule 3: In an ideal world, the career of the artist or the content of their songs should provide a ready-made narrative arc for the show. So Run-DMC might work as they had such an incredible career journey. Bruce Springsteen would work, as you could easily construct an everyman character would could sing all of his songs and have them sound personal. This isn’t as absolute a rule as the others – “We Will Rock You” set the songs of Queen in an absolutely ludicrous futuristic narrative about oppression and… well, sexual conquest in space[4].

Based on these rules, we can begin to sift through all of the musical acts dwelling in the dark corners of your record collection to identify those that might be most suitable for Broadwayisation. Surprisingly, some musical heavyweights can be ruled out quite quickly:

• The Rolling Stones, for example, just wouldn’t work, unless you think that people will flock to see a musical about an intrepid hero spouting off about the power of the blues for two hours, while having vaguely racist intercourse with “brown sugar” ladies. The lyrical content of their songs is just so all over the place as to be impossible to shoehorn into a coherent structure, though they certainly nail the “tonal range” criterion.
• Prince would also not work, regardless of how much my friend Roni would like to protest otherwise. For a start, all of his songs are too similar in mood to really suit the format. You want to take people through towering highs and crushing lows, whereas the journey of Prince would start, proceed and end with a mood of “pleasant funkiness”. You can’t bring people to tears while a guy molests a wah-wah pedal. The other problem with Prince is that, for a crucial period in his life, he set his own music aside and instead focused on raising the profile of the bands signed to his label. This is a problem for us as budding Broadway producers, as am fairly sure that you could be charged with war crimes for forcing a paying audience to sit through Morris Day and The Time songs[5].
• Poison. As much as I love these 80s metal legends, their career is just not suitable for stage translation. For it to accurately reflect their story, the actors would have to simulate sex 4,232 times a night – and as it has been proven by European Union physicists and Ross from Friends that you can’t take off tight leather trousers in less than 18 minutes, the show faces an insurmountable technical barrier[6].

Even after ruling out such luminaries, there are still many bands left that could be contenders for memorialisation in musical form. I’d love to hear your suggestions (other than you Roni – Morris Day is out. Really.), but here are some of mine to get the ball rolling:

• Jay-Z. One of the great musical stories, a classic meth-to-millions tale that has all the ingredients we need. There’s a built-in audience for the show among the millions of fans who revere him as the “God MC”, and his songs capture a huge range of moods and meanings. Just think of this: after a gritty early years Act soundtracked by “Blue Magic” and “Dead Presidents II”, can you imagine how good it would feel to hear “Empire State Of Mind” or “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” marking the start of the ‘we made it’ era? The only problem with this scenario is that it would be difficult to find a performer to play Jay-Z who had the charisma, charm and energy of the man himself.
• The Flaming Lips. What a show this would be, as their music is highly theatrical to start with, there’s a huge contrast between their more reflective, low-key songs (like “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots”) and the uptempo tracks, and there are semi-coherent sci-fi storylines already built into their lyrics. Again, there’s only one problem, and that is that their incendiary live shows are theatrical enough as it is, reducing the need for a stage adaptation. Plus, their giant hamster ball probably wouldn’t please the haute-coutured theatregoing crowd as it rolled over their heads.
• Limp Bizkit. Imagine this with me – a moving tale following Fred Durst as he escapes his life as a humble tattoo artist in Southern Florida, eventually becoming a multi-platinum recording artist, film director and misogynist[7]. The song titles already capture the essential elements of the arc. Fred just wants “My Generation” to “Take A Look Around”, realise that society just “Eats you Alive”, fight to learn “The Truth”, join forces and get “N 2 Gether Now”, begin a revolt and “Break Stuff”, before realising that you just want to be loved as you softly weep “Behind Blue Eyes”. Most of all, however, Fred wants you to know one thing: he did it all for the nookie. The nookie. The nookie. Such things Tony Awards are made of, people.

I’m sure you agree that all of those scenarios would be far better than sitting through a performance of Mamma Mia, but are they the best we can do? What are your ideas? Emails to the usual address, remember the rules, and above all else… no Morris Day.

---

[1] Seriously, a two and a half hour musical entirely consisting of ABBA songs? I challenge anyone to say that they truly dig “Honey, Honey” or “When I Kissed The Teacher” from “More Abba Gold”

[2] Let’s face it, no-one is coming to see a musical about that one band who were signed to Equal Vision Records in 1999 that you really dug, but who got dropped before their second album

[3] For the Soulja Boy fan reading this: “Kiss Me Thru The Phone” does not count as an introspective song. Unless your show is entirely written from the perspective of the phone.

[4] Even the “simplified summary” of We Will Rock You begins by describing a key plot development thus: “The two heroes, Galileo and Scaramouche, discover musical instruments buried in rock, which they use to vaporise the head of the corporation (The Killer Queen), and send the Power Of Rock around the world to free the masses”. Perfectly logical, am sure.

[5] So as not to destroy a friendship, I have to stress that this view of Morris Day is that of the author alone, and not shared by his co-conspirators. Roni has frequently declared her love for Mr Day, his jheri curls and his “coked-up dance steps”.

[6] If technology ever advances to the point where this is not a problem, count me in. Who wouldn’t pay to go and see a Poison-themed show called “Lovin’ You’s A Dirty Job”?

[7] This footnote was originally going to include the lyrics to a particularly “interesting” Bizkit song about women, but there’s no way we could have published it. So instead, I leave you with this inspirational gem from the mind of the Durst: “may the bed bugs shrivel and die before they make it into your sheets to eat you alive”.

A Warped Worldview, or To Hate Or Not To Hate?

DC 11/09/09

Word count: 1,373

The wonderful new Nick Hornby book "Juliet, Naked" is in many ways essential reading for music fanatics like us. While telling a brutal story about doomed relationships and the choices people make, Hornby touches on many of the crucial questions that music fans have been debating for years. For me the most vital and interesting is this: is music something that can be evaluated and rated in absolute terms (e.g. "this record is good, this is bad"), or is it really something subjective that can only be assessed in terms of the impact that it has on a particular listener at a particular moment. To put it simply, can you or I ever say that the Black Eyed Peas suck, based on our in-depth study of all things musical, or does the fact that a 15 year old girl really digs "I Gotta Feeling" invalidate our opinion?

In Hornby's book, one of the characters is a music enthusiast called Duncan. Duncan is an avid fan of a singer-songwriter called Tucker Crowe, and he believes that he has listened to Crowe's albums so many times, has studied their intricacies in so much detail, that he can definitively say that they are "good music". By extension, he believes that he can say with certainty that anyone who doesn't appreciate Crowe's work is an idiot, or has no taste. This reminded me of the furore that surrounded the choice of bands on this year's Warped Tour. Throughout the summer punk bands were criticising Warped founder Kevin Lyman for picking electro-pop bands Brokencyde and Millionaires for the tour, often resorting to stating that the young bands "just made bad music". Influential and respected scene figures like Anthony Ranieri from Bayside, rapper P.O.S. and even relative newcomers like Florida pop-punkers Set Your Goals were quick to declare that the bands "sucked", without so much as an "in my opinion" or a "compared to..." to soften their distaste.

Up until this episode, I'd always struggled to frame my views on this subject. When we are young we are trained to think that behaviour, art, performance can always be evaluated in absolute terms. This is necessary, I suppose, if children are ever to obey parents and teachers, and to be encouraged to avoid things that are corrosive to young minds. After this, I'd arrived at University and had Professors spend three years telling me that nothing should be examined in such a way, that everything was about interpretation and relative experience. However, the Warped episode and reading "Juliet, Naked" have helped clear up my views. My immediate reaction to reading Ranieri's comments were "wow, it's slightly ironic to hear a guy who has spent years asking people not to be judgmental about music and to think about things intelligently simply dismissing something as "bad" without even acknowledging the fact that Brokencyde perform to hundreds of kids a day, kids who seemed to be drawing real joy from their performance". I thought that Ranieri was falling into the Duncan trap of assuming that his years of experience of punk rock entitled him to declare what was good or not, what was punk or not, what was Warped Tour or not.

The problem with the absolutist argument, it now seems to me, is about the standard that you apply when evaluating something. To feel able to say definitively that something is "good" or "bad", you have to have a measure to use, a set of criteria that serve to separate things. In this case, people have suggested a number of indicators of the suckitude of the Warped bands, including:

- "they suck, because [Influential Person X] says so". Bullshit, plain and simple. Look, I will admit to having deep feelings of reverence for certain members of the punk community. If Brett Gurewitz or Tom Gabel or Dustin Kensrue says something, then I tend to view it in a positive light because of the integrity that I believe those people possess. However, I would never assume that everyone else feels the same way, or that the opinion of those individuals should automatically override the opinions of anyone else. So I'm sorry Mr Ranieri, but there are no such things as "scene points" in real life, and your word can't be taken as gospel.

- "they suck, because they don't play instruments". Well, plenty of great musical performers haven't played instruments (off the top of my head, almost every top-class rapper fits this bracket). And while Mr Punk Rock might not view rappers as real musicians either, I think the Jay-Z / Noel Gallagher Glastonbury fiasco put that argument to rest once and for all.

- "they suck because they don't write their own songs". I agree that there is a genius inherent in writing a song. I admire people like Ryan Adams, who can do it seemingly at will. I think that to be seen as a truly great musician, you have to write your own material. But to be a performer, and that's all that Brokencyde claim to be and aspire to be, you just have to get on a stage and kill it. You don't need to have written what you play, you just need to play the shit out of it. And, as much as you or I (for I don't love their output, and think that songs like "Freaxxx" potentially encourage date rape, but that’s a separate issue) might not like them, they have fans who think their performances are brilliant.

There are other standards that people have tried to use, but I have similar problems with all of them. Which, again got me questioning my beliefs, and I came to this conclusion: the thing that I loved most about punk rock when I was first getting into it was that, to all intents and purposes, it was unjudgemental. Punk rock said to me, as a 16 year old who didn't quite feel like he fitted in, "you are welcome here, whatever you are into". You might like hardcore, it might be thrash that gets you off, whatever, it doesn't matter. An integral part of being a subculture is about having flexible standards - as punk rock fans we are saying to newcomers "listen, the mainstream may not seem right for you and that's fine, you have the right to be into whatever you are into". In the light of that, turning around and attempting to tell people what they should or shouldn't like seems hypocritical - if you feel angry when people tell you that your band or the music you love "sucks", why do you then perpetuate that by telling other people that what they like "sucks"? Why not accept that they aren't the same as you, that your tastes may be different, and get back to doing something positive?

Ultimately, the thing that made up my mind, the thing that convinced me that Hornby is right in advocating the relativist view, was rock and roll. Last week, I watched a video of Against Me! playing at a festival in Florida a couple of years ago (you can see it here: http://nationalunderground.org/national-underground-recordings/29-against-me-the-fest-4 The second video is particularly amazing, if only for the phenomenal runthrough of "Problems" and the stage invasion at the end of "We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)”). Their performance was just wonderful, powerful and passionate, everything I love about music. And I realised, while lost in the energy of it all, that some people would hate it. Would note that Tom Gabel can't really sing and that the guitars are slightly out of tune and that a lot of their songs sound kind of the same. And you know what? I would love to debate that with them, I would love to try to convince them to see things my way - but if at they end of the day they didn't see it I would hope that they would accept that my opinion was as valid as theirs, and that we would part as friends. That's the problem with the "they just suck argument", it robs us of both the excitement of the debate and then the camaraderie of agreeing to disagree. Losing those things... well, that would just suck.

A Flight and A Crash

DC 22/07/09

A Flight and A Crash

As the saying goes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was my immediate response to reading recent interviews in which Chino Moreno and other members of metal group Deftones discuss the car wreck that plunged their bassist Chi Cheng into a coma. The band seem like good people, who have been, as you would expect, scarred and saddened by their experience. On that personal level, this has been a tragic turn of events and clearly all sympathies should be directed to those involved.

As well as the personal issue, I think there may be a musical loss here too, which while clearly insignificant in the broader context is also a shame. The loss is this – just at the time when the band were hit with Cheng’s crash, they may have been about to push modern metal forward again.

This doesn’t mesh well with the predominant critical take on Deftones, which is that they were late-90s innovators in the hard rock field who have since settled into a boundary-respecting groove. And this is true to a point – their self-titled record did seem a little stagnant and free of new tricks. However, this view also underestimates the brilliance of their last record, the unjustly overlooked “Saturday Night Wrist”, which was packed with excitement and innovation.

“…Wrist” met the unfortunate fate that some long-gestating works of art do – it became known more in relation to the tortured process of its creation than in terms of its music. The narrative surrounding its release was that the record was the product of a band riven by personality disputes and internal conflict – and as a result of this the vast majority of reviews failed to analyse it in any depth beyond saying “holy hell, it’s amazing this disc even got made!”

That was a mistake, as “…Wrist” got closer to achieving something than almost any other hard rock record has. That something is to capture feelings of romanticism, lust, longing, eroticism and craving, within the structures of modern metal. Metal has always been a useful channel for certain emotions – anger, be it political (Rage Against The Machine) or personal (Nine Inch Nails). Aggression (take a bow, Limp Bizkit). Pure sexual lust (Motley Crue). All of these emotions are relatively easily communicated by means of crunching riffs, spiralling solos an driving drumbeats. What metal has never been good at is capturing less extreme, more heady, more complex feelings – and particularly those relating to romantic love and longing.

This was where the genius of “…Wrist” sat. It’s swirling textures and melodies, topped by the gorgeous croons and screams of Moreno, began to paint those feelings. And it did it without sacrificing heaviness – in fact, the ferocity of the delivery system was crucial to the mapping of the more conflicted parts of the heart. Every minute of this record, from Moreno’s moans on Hole In The Earth and plaintive cries of “I’ll be waving goodbye” on Xerxes to Steph Carpenter’s mating-whale guitars on Cherry Waves dripped sensuality. This was underpinned by Cheng’s flexible, keening basslines, the musical equivalent of bedroom eyes. All of this is pretty hard to pull off while also rocking a moshpit.

And that’s where the musical tragedy of all of this bites. While “…Wrist” was a brilliant record, you felt that Deftones could have taken things still further. You hoped that they would be brave enough to try, rather than turning back to the easier task of writing musical that was purely angry or heavy for heavy’s sake. And then they revealed that their 2009 album would be called “Eros”, surely a sign that the band was rising to the challenge. How could a record with a title like that not explore the finer points of love and sex?

As a result of Cheng’s crash, however, Eros has been shelved. The band made the brave choice not to release the record, as Cheng had been such an integral part of its creation that the other members didn’t feel that it was right to play the songs without him. Instead, the Deftones are writing a new record inspired by his accident. I am absolutely sure that this is the right course to take, and I look forward to the record that they do release greatly. But the fact that that record won’t be “Eros” is a minor tragedy nevertheless, set against the backdrop of a much greater one.

Unloneliness, and how it leaves us...

Unloneliness, and how it leaves us…

 

DC

April 2009

1,081 words

 

                For centuries philosophers, dramatists, songwriters and chick-lit authors have tried to convince us that one of the scariest things in life is to be alone. When a person is suddenly single or relatively friendless, we worry about their ability to manage on their own, we try to suggest “coping strategies” that they can use until they are “okay with being alone”. So many works of art have been created about loneliness that you could happily watch, listen to and read nothing else for a year. What’s more, I believe that by doing so you would be able to feel, to understand what it is like to be lonely, even if in actuality you had a loving family and friends. I think artists have been able to capture extremely well the disconnection, the hopelessness, the sense of drift and distance that comes from being truly alone. They’ve even been able to sum up how hollow the advice of the more friend-blessed sounds when you aren’t in the same place – take “How To Fight Loneliness” by Wilco:

 

“Whatever’s going down,
Will follow you around.
That’s how you fight loneliness,
You laugh at every joke.
Drag your blanket blindly,
Fill your heart with smoke…

Just smile all the time.”

 

                A feeling which has been explored much less than loneliness, with its alternation between the stab and the echo of emptiness, has been its opposite. The thing that, for me personally at least, is just as powerful and shocking and disrupting. The thing that leaves you feeling strange and amazed and a little nauseous - the feeling that someone, be it a friend or partner or family member, means so very much to you that you genuinely can no longer fathom how you would function in a world without them in it. It isn’t always obvious why we should come to feel this way about people – it’s not necessarily proportional to the amount of time spent with a person, nor does it have to be related to romantic feelings, and isn’t always obvious why an individual has come to have such a place in your heart and mind. Everyone has their own threshold for this feeling, with some friends telling me that they have never experienced it while others say that they have a dozen or more people about who they feel this way. The one thing you can be sure of, however, is that once you have had the moment of realisation, once you’ve come to see just how much someone means to you, you will never forget it.

 

                Until recently, no song has ever managed to bottle that feeling as I understand it. No singer or band has brought together the strands of wonder, angst, amazement, fear, hope and confusion that can pass through you when “unloneliness”, for want of a better word, bites. Then I got sent a copy of an album called ”Mean Everything To Nothing” by an exceptional Southern band called Manchester Orchestra. It is a hugely strong record throughout, besting even their notable last disc “Like A Virgin Losing A Child”, but one song in particular made me lose my breath. Buried at track 10 is the sort-of-title track “Everything To Nothing”, and it is the unloneliness anthem I’ve been waiting for.

 

                When we’re analysing songs for the way they address human feelings and emotions we tend to focus a lot on the lyrics, and rightly so. The music of Leonard Cohen, perhaps the foremast artist of sentiment, is unexceptional but the lyrics are almost perfect, to give one example. But in this instance that would be a mistake, as the music is as crucial as the words are. The dragged-out opening notes set the scene, referencing those moments when we sit around thinking, toying with ideas about our lives, considering our happiness and friends and situation. Then, suddenly, the moment of realisation is ushered in by escalating, chiming guitars that seem to grab something in your chest and tug mightily upwards. That feeling of “oh my god, how do I deal with this, what do I do now, but hold on, this is amazing, this is wonderful, but this is terrifying” is sketched out by a simple guitar line.  The line repeats through the song, reinforced or twisted, but each time somehow becoming more powerful, more emotive.

 

                On top of this, the effect is rounded off by the simple but hugely striking lyrics of singer Andy Hull.  He paints the confusion that inevitably comes with the realisation that you are no longer your own person, that you are bound to someone, admitting that “I don’t know what to do / not anymore / not anymore”, while worrying that he somehow let his now oh-so-significant other down, stating that “I’m not complaining, I was just saying, I’m a man, I’m a lost one you see”.  He searches for things to help explain what he’s feeling, talking about notes left by Grandfather and making references to biblical passages, but none of it seems to really help. Ultimately, he has to resort to some of the most simple phrases possible to make his feelings clear, adding words only to emphasise how serious he is:

 

He starts with “you mean everything”. An amazing thing to feel about someone but a little generic, something someone might say while breaking up with their boy/girlfriend in a coffee shop. Then “you mean everything… to me”. And suddenly it’s personal, he’s admitting something huge and difficult, and he’s opening himself up to rejection and hurt. Then “you mean everything… to nothing”. Now it’s even larger, he’s willing to state that next to you, nothing else even registers on the scale, and he means it. You are one, everything else is zero. In this case Hull is talking to his wife, but he could be referring to a friend, family member, whoever, it wouldn’t matter. Then “you mean everything… to nobody but me”. The final step – he says out loud that idea that we sometimes have in our heads, the idea that no-one else other than you understands just how great a person is, that no-one could appreciate them more.

 

In writing this amazing song, Manchester Orchestra may truly have figured out how to fight loneliness – just try your best to remember what your moments of unloneliness felt like, and hope that you get to experience another one sooner rather than later. Remember that someone who doesn’t mean anything to you right now, maybe even someone you’ve never met, could come to mean everything to nothing to you. 

Grasping At Straws

Author: DC

Words: 900

First published: October 2008

Since I started writing about music, I have been trying to pull together a column that expresses why I find songs so magical, why they mean so much to me. To use words to persuade that person sitting out there, reading this and thinking “music just doesn’t excite me” that they should keep hunting, that at some point they will find that band or song or concerto that they fall in love with. To capture how one song can make you feel positively ecstatic while another crumples you up, maybe for good.

 

Each and every time I try this, I fail. I can’t find words that capture the feeling, it’s like trying to describe the colour black or the feeling you get from the first sip of the perfectly poured vanilla latte. I end up writing columns that are just dozens of examples of songs or musical moments that I adore but that, for all I know, may have no effect on anyone else. And I always end up trashing the article in frustration. However, the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that I’ve been missing the point all along.

 

There is no overarching theory. There are no words that will get this job done. There are only those moments of magic, there are only our personal reactions, and there are only descriptions. Sure, you can pick songs about, you can theorise that key changes create wave patterns that stimulate the cochlea or that the voice of Bon Jovi is scientifically proven to be an aphrodisiac to anyone wearing stonewash denim. But fundamentally all we are left with are the moments that matter to us. So I’m going to write a little bit about some of the moments that I love, and then I need to ask something of you all – I’d love you to email me or write in with yours. One persons Mozart is anothers Phil Collins and anothers Katy Perry, everything is as valid as everything else, as long as it makes your spine tingle. We’ll put them all together, put them on the website, and in 50 years time our children will be shocked that their parents loved Cheap Trick that much. So, to get the ball rolling, here are some of the things that I love:

 

–         The way Jay-Z spits the opening bars of “99 Problems”. My favourite intro to any song. The words are exceptional, but the best thing about this song is the tone – Jay’s voice is the perfect blend of teacher, confidant, resigned hustler and swaggering superhero. The best bit of all? The way he calls in the beat with an imperious “hit me”. It’s his way of saying “I could go on a capella all day and this song would still kill, but when this beat drops it’s all over”. Just killer.

 

–         That little crack in Ryan Adams’ voice. The musical equivalent of the Hillary Swank moment of defeat in “Million Dollar Baby” – it gets me every time. Sometimes Mr Adams doesn’t fully sing a note, instead using a cracking, hoarse whisper which manages to communicate lust, longing, despair, fear, hope and joy all at once. When he goes for it I feel like I’m in a lift dropping two floors a second while simultaneously kissing a beautiful girl and mourning the death of my grandmother.

 

–         The first 10 seconds of “Broadcasting” by hardcore heroes Comeback Kid. The whole song is stellar, but the opening is a pure musical adrenaline shot. The drums clatter in, the guitars roar and singer Andrew Neufeld snarls “a common threat sits in our house”. And it makes me feel like I could climb a mountain or fight Mike Tyson or achieve anything I could possibly dream of. When God works out, this is his soundtrack.

 

–         The line “you’re a wet martini in a paper cup” from “Wasp Nest” by The National. To me the only thing harder to pin down than the magic of music is the magic of a person that you love, like or admire. We try to, from the obvious (“man, she’s got great legs”) to the poetic (“she’s like the sun streaming through the clouds on a winters day”), but for my money no-one is better at this than Matt Berninger of The National. This description is both hugely opaque and totally understandable – it makes no sense, yet you know just what he means.

 

–         The lead guitar line in “Warbrain” by The Alkaline Trio. The lyrics are about all things dark and stormy, but you’d know that without even hearing them. The spiralling guitar line perfectly echoes the rising and falling of the wind during a storm, the utter beauty with the hidden threat, the crackle of lightening and the rumble of thunder. I once listened to this song about a dozen times in a row during a storm-swept bus ride in Scotland, and… man, that was something else.

 

So, there are mine. The chances are you won’t have heard them, or won’t necessarily quite understand why I love them so much. And that’s fine by me, as long as you have some moments of your own. So send them in, I’d love to read them – or if they are too personal and you don’t want to make them public then at least go find your ipod or turntable or boombox and give them a listen…

Common Existence

Author: DC

Words: 1,414

First published: Election Time 2008

During the 24 hours after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States of America, I seemed to run into all of the politically-aware people that I know. Some are left-leaning, others fall on the right of the spectrum, and of course they all had an opinion on what had happened and they had all experienced waves and waves of emotion as the results came in. Obama supporters felt elated, relieved, proud, shocked and stunned. His opponents felt sad, wary, worried and fearful. But what struck me that day wasn’t that people had reacted strongly to the events, you expect that during every election. The thing I noticed was that people, as they processed their responses and tried to make sense of what had happened, were actually physically reaching out to each other. The Obama fans were wrapping each other in celebratory hugs, exchanging high-fives and fist bumps and handshakes. The McCainites were literally leaning on each other for support, arms around shoulders, hands resting on the curves of backs, hands ruffling hair.

 

            The election was significant to each of the people on a personal level – they all believed in their favoured candidate, felt strongly that the world needed that man in these difficult times, and sensed that this was one of those moments upon which history pivots. But it was particularly powerful for them because it had become a communal experience, with people thousands of miles apart, people who might not normally be friends or even talk to each other, and people who would normally shy away from participating in “mass movements” all drawn together as part of something bigger. Victory or defeat weren’t things to savour or mourn alone, they had to be shared with others, oftentimes in that most direct form possible – physical human contact.

 

            As I walked home on the night after the election, I tried to think of anything else in recent memory that had made me feel so connected to people, a part of a bigger movement, like one of the swallows who fly in a perfect “V” formation over my house each spring. And I could only think of one thing that had made me feel so wired into the world, and it wasn’t an epic event or a single shining moment – it was something that had been around me forever and was there almost all of the time. It was music.

 

            Music utterly shapes the way in which I relate to people, and more often than not has been the thing that has made me feel bound together with others on a level that goes beyond the same-place-at-the-same-time ordinariness of things. Starting at the most basic level, music is my solution to personal shyness. I find it hard to talk to people I don’t know very well already, small talk is not my strong point, and that initial period of stumbling to find common ground kills me. And music is the way around that – simply asking someone who their favourite bands are and what music they like changes the conversation from something a bit intimidating into something fun and manageable. If the most basic communal experience is sitting around and talking to people, then music is my way in.

 

            Music isn’t just a conversational tool either, as it has the power to offer definition to who we are and, by extension, who we are likely to bond with. As a case study, look at the much-maligned “emo” community. The mainstream media couldn’t have misinterpreted what emo stands for more. They posit that it is eroding social interaction and values by encouraging kids to dwell on their inner feelings rather than outward actions, and by eroding individuality and replacing it with Hot Topic standardisation. Somehow this is meant to result in the development of a generation incapable of true friendship, who believe that there is only one “right” way to be. In truth, it’s about precisely the opposite – it’s about people in a fractured world in which it is hard to make friends trying to make that process easier by giving an initial upfront indication of who they are. “If you have black hairdye and a Paramore t-shirt like mine, then I’m probably going to like you”. It’s about people who don’t really know themselves yet clutching onto the one thing that they are absolutely sure of – that they adore the music they listen to – and projecting that outward. They aren’t less individual just because they love something that everyone else does, because that love comes from somewhere true and pure and absolutely individual inside them. And, crucially, of all of the musical “scenes” it is by far the least elitist of all – yes, you have to have something in common with the rest of your group, be it a love of My Chemical Romance or All Time Low. But then it doesn’t matter what else you do or love, you can listen to black metal or American hardcore or even the Backstreet Boys, and it makes no difference. As long as there is something there binding you together, that’s all that counts.

 

            Music also acts as a support system for those times when your sense of connection to the communal seems to fade, when you feel a little isolated or that what you are going through is so unique that no-one else could understand it. Having someone sing a line that connects with you and that speaks to your personal situation can restore that connection and remind you of what you are part of. In a recent interview with Spin Magazine, Thursday singer Geoff Rickly hit on exactly this when he explained that his band had called their new record Common Existence because “no matter how big the tragedy seems in your life, it's just the same thing every other person out there is going through. Even the biggest things in our lives are just very commonplace and everyday”. He’s not trying to downplay the severity of personal situations or to say that individual experience doesn’t matter; he’s just saying that you’re rarely as alone as you think you are. Sometimes, having a song remind you of that can keep you from spinning off out of orbit.

 

            Finally, just as the election victory gave people such an immediate thrill or shock that they felt physically compelled to lay hands on each other, so can music bring us together with other people in the most immediate sense. Anyone who has been in the crowd at that moment when a concert went from being merely “good” to “absolutely transcendent” knows what I mean. Sometimes when you hear the right song at the right moment, you don’t just want to sing or dance or headbang alone. You want to grab the nearest person to you, to put your arm around them, to shout back the lines together. Sometimes we don’t just want that direct connection, we crave it.

 

Once again Geoff Rickly understands this, singing during the climax of Thursday’s seminal song Sugar In The Sacrament that  “this is all we’ve ever known of god… fight with me, let me touch you now”. For a lot of people, that feeling they get when they listen to an amazing song, that feeling of beauty and thrilled excitement, is the closest they’ve come to a religious experience, is the thing that gives them the “First Black President” jolt of energy, is the moment at which they feel connected to everyone and everything. And it makes them want to come together with people to love or fight or have sex or talk or just to be.  It has certainly had that effect on me; I remember listening to Thursday play that song at the Electric Ballroom in London, England. I had my right arm around the shoulders of Dusty, one of my very best friends since primary school. I was screaming the words back at Rickly with everything I had in me. I was staring at the fearsomely bright plain white lights above the stage, because I felt like I might explode or cry or lose it altogether if I looked down at the band tearing at their instruments onstage. Every quarter second a moving body would bounce off me, spin around me, slam into my chest, and it felt totally perfect. And when the song had ended, and the band had filed offstage, and the house lights had gone up, almost no-one left the room. People stood there, milling around, hugging total strangers.   

A Metaphor, For The Insecure

Author: DC

Words: 1,236

First published: Christmas 2008

So much has been written about the historic rise of Barack Obama, about his roots and development, and about his inauguration to the Presidency that I wasn't sure I wanted to address it here. Sometimes when you pore over something, when you try to capture in words that indefinable thing that makes an event or a time period feel special, you erode its magic and in trying to honor it make it less than it should be. This phenomenon seemed to come to a head at the time of Obama's inauguration - there was so much static being emitted by news radio, talk show hosts, cable networks, print journalists and bloggers that it felt impossible just to take in the event for what it was, that there were so many other voices in your head that you couldn't hear the voice of the man on the podium.

Musicians were partly responsible for Obama burnout too. So many pro-Barack jams were released during the campaign and the "President Elect" period that it was hard to keep track, and very few of those in any way captured the feelings that were sweeping the country and the electorate. They either resorted to glib declarations of historical significance, repeated so often that they somehow sounded run-of-the-mill, or unrealistic rainbows-and-unicorns declarations of how the post-Bush world was instantly going to become a modern day Garden of Eden. Sure, there were some good one-liners: I personally resorted to a mixture of laughing and sniffling the first time I heard Jay-Z declare that "my President is black / but his House is all White". But on the whole music and musicians found it difficult to encapsulate in chords or rhymes what he were experiencing in our heads and hearts.

It struck me some time later that one song had actually managed to capture what made things feel so seismic and so urgent, albeit unintentionally. A song released in November 2007, before the final stage of the Obama rocketride, perfectly evokes the feelings of November 2008. It doesn’t do this by waxing hopeful or talking about change – instead, the artist eloquently makes the case for change by describing his environment as shaped by the Presidency of George Bush, by presenting the reasons why we needed hope rather than a profile of the ultimate source of that hope. The Washington DC rapper Wale, in his song “Nike Boots”, drew out all of the themes and issues that made us desperate for change, and by listening to the song we can identify all of the reasons why we felt so elated on Election Day, all of the things that we hope to see during an Obama presidency:

The restoration of representation:

Pure and simple, many people felt either passively unrepresented or actively discriminated against during the Bush era. While Wale’s DC hood was particular in having “no Congressional reppers”, even those who had Congressmen or Congresswomen to elect often found it hard to see what good it did them. The political powerplayers seemed distant, disconnected and vainglorious, “nobody seems to care, so complacent with the victory”, no-one truly wanted to “represent the lifeless lives”. One of the things we were all hoping that the Obama administration will achieve is to restore the feeling that people are genuinely being represented, that the best interests of the majority are looked after. Wale touched on what we longed to hear from Obama when he declared that “I decree I’m forming a new alliance / oppose the ones poisoning the minds / they lying”.

The repair of social division

Societies are always complex, difficult entities that tend towards splintering and a lack of internal cohesion. It is hard to argue, however, that the Bush era didn’t see a heightening of social divisions and an increase in feelings of separation and alienation. It felt like “the love is gone with one another”, like “we ain’t right and always at our throats”, and that’s a “hard” way to live. It wears on you, and no amount of ceremony or recourse to national pride will make up for that. The result is that everyone ended up feeling tentative and worn down – “melancholy we are / although we learn to live it / pessimistic we are / carry odds like luggage”. People ended up looking inwards, focusing on keeping themselves going at the expense of others, of looking after their little worlds rather than the large one, hence Wale’s desperate plea that people come together across “PG, Riverdale, Largo, Temple Hills, Cap Heights, 124, Landover, Everywhere, Saratoga, 640, Berry Farms, 1-4, KDY, every corner.” No President, no matter how broad-based his appeal, will be able to resolve all or any of these issues straight away. But let’s be honest, we are all dreaming that in 8 years time we might be able to say that significant steps forward have been made.

An end to shameful and shameless partisan bickering

Republicans and Democrats alike used the last eight years to further their personal initiatives, to bicker and argue, and crucially to exalt the political process over and above policy achievement. They cared more about the way that the sausages were made than whether the sausages themselves tasted good. Wale perfectly captures that the mood in Washington, the “most opinionated city you can make it in”, was all sound and fury (“a lot of drama / a lot of beef”) and ultimately signified nothing. While people in his neighbourhood bought black Nike Boots because “if you ain’t wearing no color can’t nobody say nothing” the politicians hid behind their colors, appealing to died-in-the-wool Reds and Blues rather than tending to the populace as a whole. They shrugged off personal accountability, hiding behind party lines, thinking that “one can never be judged when he dress like his brothers”. Again, this will be hard to change during the Obama Presidency, as the looming battles over the Stimulus Package indicate, but if change is needed anywhere it is on Capitol Hill and State Capitals.

The return of higher ideals

Honestly, as much as we all like to pretend that we value political realism over lofty rhetoric, there is a part of everyone that wants a President to embody or reflect a little human magic. While we may grade them on ground-out results, if they can get things done while appealing to our emotional sensibilities then so much the better, and never was that more true than after four years of Bush-Cheney realistic cynicism. So having a President who is lyrical (have you heard a better description than Wale’s evocation of “A fighter / in the form of a writer / in the form of a poet”)  and committed (“Lord, I’m so focused / more focused that I’ve ever been”) and appeals to the many rather than the few (“From the dealers to the kids / to the squares to the fly / one thing we are aligned with”) felt wonderful.

Most of all, as the Obama campaign realised early, we wanted an injection of hope, and energy, and a sense of possibility amid the chaos. We wanted to feel like a great country could turn itself around, could be a force for good again, could de-Cheney itself. We wanted to feel like the United States, after everything that’s happened during the last few years, could, in the words of Wale, “still walk around, flyer than the rest of ‘em”.