I wrote a bit about R.E.M. and Troy Davis and the hikers jailed in Iran and pop critics and The Interwebs, for The Rumpus. Here’s a peek:
By evening, my various feeds took on a competitive tone. Many on Twitter commented humorously they could feel the attention of white people shifting away from Davis and onto indie rock nostalgia as homages to R.E.M. started making the rounds. Later a graphic went viral on Facebook. It showed Troy Davis’ face next to text that read: “I’m glad everybody’s upset about Facebook changing.”
Point taken – some things are a bigger deal than others and it’s good to have perspective. White people like indie rock and are not frequently killed by our government. I got it. But also … something about the mean-spiritedness of it all didn’t sit right with me. Why are we so invested in judging each other’s real-time filtering of current events online? Of course a rock band breaking up isn’t as important as Troy Davis being killed. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t touched in real and important ways by it.
The skyline was beautiful on fire all twisted metal stretching upwards …
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it like a daydream or a fever
Then the guitars come in.
Slow-builds are the currency these children of northern landscapes favor. Maybe it’s to do with the skies norther and bigger, or the nights colder, or the capability of cultures even ever so slightly different than American to take a teeny bit more time with their climaxes. Whatever the reason for their capability to build and rise and fall musically, it is “F-sharp A-sharp Infinity”, this album, live and smoking, that Godspeed You! Black Emperor will be playing when our cities burn and it is this band, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, who will still echo through canyons when we are no longer bound by squares and steel.
Or at least that’s how it felt two days ago, when I wasn’t in urban canyons and instead was in real ones. GY!BE albums are always a soundtrack to something, but most often when I hear them or choose to put them on the stereo it is because I want to accompany the epic ups and downs of cities, car trips, rush hours, the sunset behind the façade of the apartment building across the street, the scary sense when the night is nothing but sirens that this could be the end of us. Their songs are mostly wordless and feature a lot of different melodies – guitars thin and phat, distorted and chorusy and unplugged, fast and slow. The drone of the slow rise to a cohesive melody that just builds and builds and then explodes into crystalline clarity, washing clean the mishmash ruin of all that screams around us in these daily urban lives. They make noise that is pretty and varied and always, even in its jokiest or rough moments, always epic. I don’t listen to them often anymore, and when I do I listen for the symphony of my daily life.
But two days ago I wasn’t here and I wasn’t listening to anything. I was in the mountains, teetering on hungry lungs at 10,000 feet up, and the sky around me was so thin it conducted sound faster than down here in town, it amplified space in new ways, it was quiet but every thing I did felt loud. My friends and I, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra, talking and joking and crunch crunch crunching our blistered feet across rocks of every hue, between slides of snow and shale, above and inside and perched on the lip of a lake drowned between mountains, reflecting us up at ourselves over every pass. Yeah, no city here.
I want to write all the things people always like to write about being in “nature” and how it is different than not being in nature. About how coming back it takes a day or two for all the walls we live by to seem regular again — the way everything is enclosed and squared off in towns, the noise having so much to bounce against and the way in which the sounds and grinds of the city are my accustomed spacial soundtracks.
At night everything was blue, but first it was the color of fish jumping up rivers, and then it was the color of slate tumbling down after you step on it, and then it was blue. Stars bigger than the continents from which we run to them. Violins couldn’t do better than this.
We woke up one morning and fell a little bit more down.
In the morning on the lake the world was light and new-gray before the sun rose over the pass. Everything around felt both thin and immovable, granite strewn like children’s toys across the valley displaying the whim and violence of eras. Once the sun came, announcing its arrival with a rapid rollback of shadows that swept across the basin like a wave, there was nothing to do but join in. Rise, sleepy, wash in snow’s drippings, shiver and laugh and hear your daily routine bounce down the river and away.
To return from silence, from physical intimacy involving only elements, from the pause-button simultaneity of this natural landscape: simple/majestic; cold/hot; up/down; quiet, loud, quiet. To return feels messy and imperfectly composed. To return to cracked sidewalks not cracked boulders, to brakes squeaking not bats squeaking, to the messy crude beauty of the cities we’ve built seems callous. Everything seems callous. I want to hear the rocks fall.
So I put on this record in the morning before work, trying to sound-track my way back into the life I’ve chosen, into the locked groove, in this destructive and ridiculous and ugly city I’ve helped build. This destructive and ridiculous and ugly city I also love. And I listen for the composition, the sound, the arrangements that illustrate what guitars and amplifiers think it sounds like when a skyline falls. When it’s gone, maybe we will all hear better. Maybe we’ll be blue again.
Take a jam band, lay it down in the synthetic decade of the 1980s, amplify it, and coat it with a thin stain of patented British negativity. Play a song as though you were trying to become a locked groove on a vinyl record. Take lots of drugs, see God, fight, break up, make up, fight, see God, think you are God, make music, take more drugs. Wake up sometime later and find that you’re still good.
For me, Spacemen 3 was a band I came to in a way that was blessedly free of cultural context. I don’t even remember the first time, but I remember a lot of in-between times, nights extended into sunrises, road trips, windburnt cheeks, ill advised mornings spent not being good. There are eras and eras. Mine were around the year 2000. That’s about it.
Here’s the short version: The band was headed by two guys who named themselves J. Spaceman and Sonic Boom. They had lots of drama and the band broke up. Spaceman went on to head Spiritualized. Sonically, they occupy an interesting place in the context of the 1980s—space rock, or what is basically electric psychedelic music based on repetition, simple refrains, and a production sound that expands the physical space around the tracks while also laying down a heavy blanket of almost-looping circular verses over your neck. This particular album was a post-break-up reissue, I think, of an early (1984) recording session. It is not as slick as later efforts, and for that alone I love it.
For all the fucked-up children of the world we give you Spacemen 3, and they give you:
Blues guitar line, low, in place of a bass and overwashed with chorus pedal brushes of repetition. Play it again, loop entire concepts of songs, then play it again. Watch the people line up at the diner across the street for breakfast when you’re still rubbing the bootlace burns off your calves from the night before. Know not when or with whom, but know you will go sideways around and again.
Drugs have nothing to do with it. Although this album is drugs, of course. Is the sky-embracing fervor of romantic visions. Is Blake and John Donne and all that shit.
One of the many things I did this weekend was take a few people I like very much but don’t know very well to my father’s house in Santa Cruz. Try to play tour guide to a past which I sometimes barely remember, yet of which I am a bodily summation. Adore it. I looked at a room, wood on the walls and thin cotton curtains in the window, in which I lived and my younger sister lived and then my younger younger sister and now no one knows whose room to call it. I thought about being not the youngest anymore. Because I always think of myself as young. As being from a younger generation rising up on sounds made by those before us. As listening to an older friend’s records and wondering how to get from where I am to where they have lived.
Staring at this little room occupied by so many teenage lives and dramas and listenings and fantasies and realizations, I wondered inside at it. At the loop of the simple equation that some people see as a path to transcendence but I generally see as just being us, doing this, alive, here. With music, we all are younger siblings. Are the next in a circle of tripped out efforts or wrong headed directions. And also are always getting older.
Now, older and more still, I listen alone. Surrounded, though. Spacing out, existential quandaries not different but always valid, cheeks windburnt and muscles stiff from spining the routes of my backstory. Here in the city of my present, as an older sibling looking back at listening spaces past, I ask: when do we learn the difference between rock and reality? Do we ever? Then, when do we forget it? What is the moment you can’t resist, as you and I move further up the generational loop? Should you summon it, invoked by layers of metaphysical pop, or let it settle and stick to the curve of the road? How can you get there without looping your life mistakes like a sonic book?
And also to that younger one, you with all the nights and jobs and drugs and mistakes and rapture yet ahead of you, I say: I know you’re still going to make something great and then make mistakes and fight and break up. I know you’re going to quit before you’re ahead, try tacking backward after it’s too late, kiss someone on a carpeted floor that’s seen generations of betrayals and mundanity. I know you’re gonna have empty sixpacks rolling around your kitchen counter in the morning and bemoan the passage of this made-up thing called time.
This feeling of transcendence: the sonic amazement this band seeks and sometimes delivers on, depending on your state and the time in the morning it is and the drooping eyelids of the person next to you. The state is not quite like heaven. Or even rapture. It’s just like looking at the bad decisions you’ve ever made in another person’s electric eyes and saying, Yes. This is religion. This deliverance, this sex. Error and sin. Fuck-ups, please.
Put it on and spin and just obliterate me. It’s okay. We won’t remember it tomorrow anyway.
It’s a tricky thing in music. When you want to join a band and you look at ads on Craigslist, the protocol is for both parties to list their influences as a way to gauge potential musical compatibility. But bands don’t necessarily sound like the bands they consider influences. Musicians don’t always know the bands that are influencing them at the time. And some bands are so influential, citing them is sort of ridiculous.
Musicians from seminal New York punk bands to ’80s synth pop groups to producer Steve Albini to Bruce Springsteen claim Suicide as an influence. Now that synth music has resurged, you can add bands like TV on the Radio to that list. M.I.A. has sampled them. Music people from all corners of the industry freakin’ love this band, especially their self-titled debut album. And most music listeners have never heard of them.
Suicide was a duo of Alan Vega and Martin Rev who, like their New York punk contemporaries, were about confrontational performance first and music second. They sang and played synthesizers and drum machines. They got yelled at by the audience a lot. They wore ridiculous sunglasses. They didn’t record an album until 1977. And I have many dear friends who cite this as one of the best albums ever. I never heard of it until it was rereleased in 2002, a time when I was hanging out primarily with record collector geeks. But once I heard it, I could not ignore its influence.
On the one hand, the songs are a bit heavy handed from a contemporary perspective. Really, “suicide?” A song named “Che”? Are you serious? But these guys invented this. They were serious, and also not serious. It performance, avant garde stuff, as was the style of NYC punk and postpunk in the 70s and 80s. They were making self-annihilation through offensive-yet-overly-sincere music when lots of people were still listening to Joni Mitchell. (No offense to Joni. Love her.) They hit you over the head with their sound – primitive effects, electro synth walls of sound backing spookily processed vocals. Anger so thick you can see it slide off the vinyl. Or, wait… is that sarcasm?
On the other hand, who cares? It’s good. And it’s inescapably modern — it’s crazy that this record is 40 years old. The electronic minimal rawness of the band sounds like something the coolest kids in the hippest clubs would stand and nod their heads for into the wee hours of the morning, today. And at the same time, it’s genuinely spooky—deeply effective as a piece of music.These songs assault you with their pretenses but then, also, they slip inside and make you a little bit afraid. A little bit on edge. A lot sad about our mixed up modern technological lonely lives and, certainly, deeply mortal.
And Suicide probably changed your favorite rock band’s sound for the better. So give it some credit, with a grain of salt, and lie back and listen yourself to death with the pre-punk post-punk goodness of it all.
And sometimes, a band writes a record that is the soundtrack to your actual dreams. Nightmares included.
Some albums become bedtime albums for me. Long before this album, R.E.M.’s Automatic for the People. A bit after, for at least a year: Sparklehorse‘s It’s a Wonderful Life. I listened to Things We Lost in the Fire every night at bedtime for six months straight. Every night. Even when that night had already turned to morning. Even when I didn’t make it past the first “sunflower.”
side four, engraved
Some nights, dark pressured in like that heartbeat in “Embrace” and slipped me under the pulse of my own subconscious, twitching and inexpressable. When you kick out as you’re falling past the edge of
awake, our bodies are as the instruments of us. The wall of these soundings sneaks in beneath the beat of sleep: I dreamed to this album. A lot. A lot about death, and the frailty of the human form, and the ineffability of being vulnerable. Being made of elements. Like water. Like this, like here we go again off the edge of something, like
oh!
i wake into air, blue metal rusts the horizon above the riverbed under the fact of this
every thing that hurts, hurts more in water
oh, roll off the freeway the wrong way we turn into sky see the snake thread of the river’s patience brace and curl then land, like a bird, safe not in water
where every thing still hurts that hurts more in water
oh this as a dance of
words that is made, we never can move enough we swim too much
and every thing that moves hurts water hurts water
or this as yes, for i will bind your chain in cloth and thread it through your heart to help you breathe
