BB #02: STRAIGHT STREET

Intro, one.

STRUCTURE

Surprisingly basic.  It's three verse/chorus pairs, then a bridge, then two more verse/chorus pairs with a different arrangement (and/or key), but with the final verse having the same lyrics as the first verse.  Since there's less to deal with here, maybe I can delve into the instrumentation and whatnot a bit more. 

The song begins with a shot that's more of a rock explosion than any point in "Quay Cur" was, and it reminds me strongly of (don't kill me) Loretta Lynn's "Portland Oregon"[1]--slide guitar, simple drums miked roughly, bass, very twangy and much lower on the keyboards, despite the clucking noise that plays eighths here.  The contrast with "Quay Cur" is, I think, quite useful, as we actually hear the first crash cymbal of the entire album here, at the very beginning of the track, which is an odd thing for a rock-ish band, although not as much if you know the Furnaces.  Moreover, the crash doesn't reoccur until the section change, and the only percussion throughout the intro appears to be a snare.  This can work sometimes, but here the fact that it doesn't, that it doesn't really hold down the other instruments (the clucking noise is often hugely off-beat) and that it doesn't actually work for the rocky structure being set up, is somehow important.  In the context of following the first song, even that small sop to conventionality becomes huge.  So they're playing with our expectations here, I think.

At any rate, moving beyond the first beat of the song (ahem), the explosion also works because of the particular slide riff being deployed here, which besides being the only significant source of tonality in the intro, starts at a pleasing height[2] before descending to a tone, repeating, and then dipping down before coming back up to the same center tone, and repeating.  This is powerful for two reasons: a) it starts relatively high in pitch for the instrument, and b) it's basically vamping on the same chord, going, I dunno, a fourth above and a fourth below or something alone those lines.  (I should really do these not at work so I could have an instrument handy, but oh well, I'll have to keep doing it by ear.)

The riff also works well because of the way it charges into the first verse vamp, which it does at 0:20.  What happens here are a few important things that represent an almost crash-edit difference between the two bits: the slide and snare cut out, there's a crash hit but then no more drums, piano and bass come in, and the only thing that runs through is the squawk noise.  (Which if you want to get technical about it sounds like a high-res medium-cut fourth-octave half-noise synth burst.)  As for the bits itself, the piano is playing a discordant stagger between two notes with a syncopated swing that resolves to a straighter sixteenth-eighth-eighth-eighth on the higher note at the end of the bar, which actually flows directly out of the tonality established by the slide guitar in the intro; both vamp around basically the same chord.  (I think it suggests a V-7, but I'm almost sure I'm making that up.  Maybe a ninth?  Oh, fuck it, it's called "clap clap blog," not "rigorous musicology blog.")  The bass seems to be riding on the same note throughout.  Near the end of the pre-vocal bit of the first verse here, the drums come in, but end up focusing on a slap-delayed snare and claps on the 2+4.  Similarly, a lead guitar comes in, played sort of furiously and semi-randomly, mostly sixteenths with repeated notes and occasional very brief forays into doubling of the piano part, with some trademark sloppily-played accidental low-string hits from time to time.  This fades out right before the vocals come in.  The first set of verses has a distinctly (and, I think, explicitly) country feel, although the chorus doesn't.  I think this has some relation to the lyrics, but we'll get to that later.  It's also notable that you could play this bit of it live in a conventional band arrangement, unlike a lot of "Quay Cur."

When Eleanor's vocals come in, they display the second brand of melody she deploys.  The first was displayed through almost all of "Quay Cur," and consists of a line that's doubled or even tripled by instruments, one that's fairly closely tied to the backing and which can't be changed very easily; it's highly tonal and tied to some sort of chord present also in the orchestration.  What we see in "Straight Street," however, is a vocal line that's very strong and confident--indeed, this strength and confidence is a lot of what makes Eleanor's delivery and melodies so appealing--but which has only a glancing relationship to the orchestration.  This is not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed, I can think of quite a few Furnaces songs where this works exceedingly well.  (If it doesn't work as well here at first, I think that's because the backing isn't quite as compelling as we've come to expect.)  This second brand of melody is absolutely key to much of the Furnaces' MO--take a melody line that isn't much dependent on any other element of the song, and you can change all of the other elements without disrupting the vocals.  This is how we get not only the different live and single arrangements, but the arrangement switches within a song, which we've already seen to some degree with the final verse of "Quay Cur" and which we'll see again very soon.

The format is this: Eleanor sings a couplet, the backing changes slightly--the bass slides up a third, the piano changes a bit--and then back into the vocals.  This happens four times, the backing pauses with a slight rollantando and an actual coherent chord on the piano, Eleanor sings a few more words, and then we're into the chorus.

The chorus is a basic IV-V blues chorus, and is only two lines.  It starts out at a slightly slower tempo than the verse, and with definitely a more deliberate rhythmic structure, and then accelerates through the last line, which is said very quickly.  Don't hear a piano in here, but there's  a regular chordal guitar and root-note bass with a full drum kit.  The great thing about this chorus--and it's a goddamn great chorus--is the combination of the accelerando with the synth riff that comes in at the end.  It's really just a series of steps up to a fifth, but both the patch (a midrange-heavy tone with a vibrato) and the really deft playing (which sort of lags a few clicks behind the changing tempo), along with the swooshing noise, kill it, and really build to that final line.

The verse/chorus bit repeats two more times, with not a whole lot of changes, aside from the quite notable addition of strings, chorus and viola, sounds like, along with a quick-strummed slide acoustic guitar in the third verse, playing little glissed-up accents that are more rhythmic than anything else.  (It's a pretty rhythmic song, really.)  After the third chorus there's a change into a bridge that starts off with a piano and synth playing doubled lines, then a quiet piano for a few bars that modulates the key down a few steps before being joined by an electric piano and, maybe, a synth, which plays a little dabble between two notes, and then the piano reprises its earlier riff in the new key accompanied by some sort of basic percussion, either a foot stomp or a muted clap on the 2+4.

Then the fourth verse kicks in straight to vocals, and as with the first verse, we have totally different instrumentation all of a sudden.  While Eleanor's singing an electric bass slides from a high note down a fifth to a lower one while a church organ plays the chords and a synth does a sort of parallel line to the riff the piano was playing in verses 1-3.  When there's no vocals, the bass slides up to mirror the wah guitar, which is playing a noisy bit of rhythmic accent which may form its main tonal suggestion purely from the wah, not any notes, but I also might be making that up, and which both, again, mirror the piano riff of the early verses.  After the fourth verse the chorus kicks in, but--and here's the odd thing--exactly as it was in the first part of the song.  There doesn't seem to be any changes.  This is followed by a brief instrumental bit that introduces the fifth verse (which is a repeat, lyrically, of the first verse) by adding the cello/viola from the third verse.  As the vocals start, these play a gliss up for the first two beats and arpeggios for the final two, emphasizing the rise and fall of Eleanor's vocals, but cut out for the inter-vocal bits.  Then another identical (but slightly more intense, somehow--more of an accelerando?) chorus, and we're done.

The second half is odd, stylistically--there's a suggestion of a sacred atmosphere with the organ and the strings, but it doesn't really sound like traditional church music or even gospel--it sounds more like, I guess, a classical combo covering a country song.

In chart form:

0:00-0:20 Intro
0:21-1:15 Verse 1
1:16-1:24 Chorus
1:25-1:58 Verse 2
1:59-2:07 Chorus
2:08-2:41 Verse 3
2:42-2:51 Chorus
2:52-3:25 Bridge
3:26-3:59 Verse 4
4:00-4:08 Chorus
4:09-4:50 Verse 5
4:51-5:00 Chorus

Update: after hearing the acoustic version of the song, Eleanor plays the verse as a I-IV progression with what sounds like a V-7 between the verses, but I'm not sure how well this maps to the album version.  I'll have to try it at home at some point.

ANALYSIS

This song has a lot more in common with Gallowsbird's than many of the other songs here on Blueberry in that it seems more concerned with interesting couplets than a narrative, but once you start to tease it out there's definitely something there.

The basic story is that Eleanor's character is a not very successful global salesperson for a the cellphone company Ericsson, and the song chronicles her sort of Gil-in-the-Simpsons if you will misadventures.  The song opens in a Syrian internet cafe where she's trying to pick up tips from the locals but it studiously looking disinterested, trying not to draw their attention and so having to go by who smells the best (by which I think she means "most affluent").  This scenario to me seems like something plucked directly from Eleanor's travel experiences, where you're in a 'net cafe in some foreign country just wanting to get some sort of connection back to your home life but being surrounded by the cafe's regulars who use it as an information center.  And so here, she hears "all the nonsense in extensia," especially about football games ("Leeds v. Valencia").  She picks out the group most likely to respond to her sales pitch, but they regard her as either: 1) a mere automaton who's there to be an opponent in a very deliberate game, or b) someone they're going to fuck with by taking on ultra-stereotypical behaviors and mannerisms.  This I'm getting from the last line, "but the only thing they care about is to whom to play the Turk," which is either a reference to a famous, but fraudulent, chess-playing machine from the 19th century (later reincarnated as a computer game), or a joke about how foreigners fuck with Americans/businesspeople.  At any rate, her sales pitch is unsuccessful.

In the second verse, she's in a more rural area; I'm going to guess from the context as some of the details that it's a North African area, but it could also easily be a lot of other places in the world (Eastern Europe, southern Russia, Asian steppes, etc., although the stuff about a cup of water and "when the sun came up" do suggest a warmer climate than these).  She's subsisting on very slim resources and ends up in a dilapidated car, suggesting both that she's out in the boonies trying to make sales and that she hasn't been doing very well, cash-flow-wise.  She does make it safely to wherever she's going, it seems, because she's able to put a question to her "local adviser" about the "trucks...parked up by the town" but receives no distinct reply, suggesting that it's a forbidden subject and makes the trucks into even more of a menace than the simple mention of noticeable-but-mysterious vehicles would imply.  I absolutely love this verse--there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on, especially with the trucks at the end, which paints a picture of whatever country (or region) she's in as being under some sort of military or otherwise milita'd control, except so covert that she's not aware of it (or, I guess, she's so oblivious that she doesn't already know and commits the faux pas of asking).  That nice collision of this very stereotypical American-style, door-to-door capitalism with the improvised governmental protection of a private or overly prominent police force (which is the case in not a few areas of our modern world) is really interesting, both because of the revelation that free market sales are only possible when the citizens are reasonably free--or, more accurately, when they're more concerned with comfort than basic survival--and because I think she would be more successful a salesperson if she wasn't so honest.  If she was crooked enough to know who had control of the town, she might be able to sell to them instead of the impoverished residents. 

This inability to make a sale continues in the third verse, where we get specific, sorta.  We're back in a more corporate environment because she's talking to "the head of sales for Western Asia" (aha!  But then why "Damascus"?) who is warning of an encroaching threat from Nokia, who might tell presumably Muslim consumers that Ericsson "uses pig by-products."  The salesperson shows up for a meeting with the Nokia people but "knew that we were Finnished" (a pretty funny actually play on words based on the fact that Nokia is from Finland and Ericsson is from Sweden) because, as the rep tells her, the phones are already being "stoned," which here I think means not "smoked up" but "hit with stones," as Muslims sometimes do to religious violators.  In other words, they have successfully spread the rumor of pig-use and so the phones are being destroyed for religious reasons.

This causes the character to be fired, and the switch in music we have after the third verse is meant, I think, to reflect this change.  In the fourth verse we see her trying to find a new job, in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia trying to learn some of those nasty tricks of the trade and setting herself up as a fence for religious and historical artifacts.  Her friends, though, try and talk her out of this, saying that she could work in Baku (in the former republic of Azerbaijan) for an American cellphone company.  But when she calls her contact at the company in Houston, she finds they have no use for her.  And thus, in the fifth verse, we find her back in the Damascus internet cafe, trying to scam her way into sales to Syrians.

The song seems to be about the conflict between honesty and theft in business dealings, and here the blur of references works for a thematic reason: in a world where there is so much, where local cultures collide with global ones and vice verse, there's no way to make sense of it, no way to go door-to-door.  And that's why the chorus: "So I walked up the length of the Street they call Straight / cursing myself cause I got there too late."  She's trying to go straight (or, even better, trying to go what people tell her is straight) but it's too late--there's no way to go straight anymore.  Everything is tainted, and even when you're trying to be devious it doesn't always work.  The only verse mention of straight street comes in reference to where the religious authorities are destroying the tainted phones, and I think that's a decent explanation of what it's talking about--a place where faith is untainted by doubt or contradiction.

CONTEXT

This is really a self-contained little episode, although aside from the various thematic references I'll get to in a moment, I do think it fits into the character arc for Eleanor.  This is probably what she's doing in between her youth in the US and being a ship captain in Asia, and her frustration here with modern capitalist business practices explains the pride she feels from managerial responsibility and manual labor in "Blueberry Boat," which we'll get to on Monday.

Aside from the geographic similarities with other songs (especially her boss being the head of sales for Western Asia), the most interesting thing here, I think, is in the title: straight street, or strait street?  I.e., a street that's a body of water.  In "Blueberry Boat" there's a mention of the Strait of Taiwan, and I think that's part of what's going on here, with nature as something purer than the cluttered earth.  But maybe not.

[1] Not that I'm asserting a relationship of influence, here, as the timelines don't mess up, but then the sound Jack White went with on Van Lear Rose sounds just a bit different from most country or blues things that came before, so I don't know a better precedent. 
[2] This is a post for another time, but it's interesting how expectation and context matter to our perceptions of instrumental intensity.  Higher, of course, is generally held to be more intense, but we get so used to the timbres and conventional sonic ranges of an instrument that it's really only high-for-that-thing.  So, for instance, a high weedly-weedly guitar riff that sounds like it's reaching into the stratosphere would still only hit maybe third position on the violin, which still has a long way to go.  (Ah the glorious high squeakiness of the violin!  I love it so.  But that, too, is for another post.)  And when we play outside that range, even on the same instrument, it usually gets regarded as somehow being a different instrument--think, for instance, of the way free-jazz saxophone squeaks were described before we got used to them, or how a pitch-shifted guitar (or one played with a slide above the fretboard) gets described.


posted by Mike B. at 5:58 PM 1 comments

Mark replies to Simon's guilty pleasures post and touches on my comments in the process.  Poptimism part 2 ensues.  Maybe.

posted by Mike B. at 1:17 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

There's been some talk recently about "guilty pleasures"--see Mark's and Simon's take on the issue.  Because I'm a hugely egotistical prick, I might as well repost what I wrote about that issue about a year ago, because, eh, I think I have a different take.

The idea of guilty pleasure is a stupid, Catholic, one, but so, I often feel, is loudly declaring that you don't have guilty pleasures. Because, let's face it, you probably do. Mine include Tori Amos and Eurovision-y europop, mainly because I don't know anyone else with decent musical taste who non-guiltily likes these things. (I still listen to 'em, though.) The problem with the concept of the guilty pleasure is less the "guilty" part and more what's defined as a guilty pleasure. The term is used by people with "good taste" to describe anything mainstream which they, horror of horrors, like. But this presumes that anything mainstream is bad, or falls within "bad taste," and I think that's just not true. Just because something is liked by a lot of other people, or not liked by the Wire, doesn't make it a guilty pleasure. The point of guilty pleasures is that you just like them, they're pure pleasure, and you don't think about it too much (viz. the above strategy of listening to the song without thinking about the horrendously politically incorrect lyrics). But there's lots of pop stuff that you should think about, that is well-crafted and interesting and wonderful.

So what should we call a guilty pleasure? ("GP" for short.) Well, GPs are fun in their own special way--aside from the "no thinking" part, you enjoy GPs alone. There's no one else you know and respect who will admit to liking it, so you have to do it "in secret," and this has a certain adulterous excitement that makes it, well, pleasurable. That's why "guilty" pleasure--because guilt can be pleasurable, too. All the lapsed Catholics (or the male submissives wearing panties and garters) will tell you that. But it's different from a regular pleasure...With a GP, you enjoy it by keeping it to yourself, your own little discovery among the trash; with a regular pleasure, you want to share it with everyone else (i.e. pop's inclusivity).

posted by Mike B. at 5:43 PM 0 comments

Just saw a bunch of interns sitting around. 

One says, "I could play you some Melt-Banana, but you wouldn't be able to handle it."

One says, a bit later, "Rap sucks.  Except maybe some Public Enemy."

Either someone else or the same one says, "All the new rap is shit.  It's all, 'Jigga-what-jigga."  Much laughter.  Then someone says something about Master P.

I don't say anything, because you have to use your power judiciously.  And, uh, apparently I have power now.  I don't know when that started.  I mainly try and undercut it by making everyone hate me.  Mission: accomplished.

posted by Mike B. at 3:39 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

BB #01: "QUAY CUR"
 
For what this is all about, please see the intro.
 
STRUCTURE
 
Actually a surprisingly simple structure, when you break it apart; go ahead and cheat down to the chart if you want to see just how simple.  Really, you can reduce it to the highly traditional verse / chorus / verse / chorus / bridge / verse / chorus format if you want to (although it's more like briiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiidge and, OK, there's an extra chorus in there). 
  
The track starts with a slight squeak for a few seconds before a distorted drum machine beat kicks in, consisting of two kick quarters and a distorted snare-ish noise that has a trailing tone that goes down for the remainder of the third beat and then up for about 2/3 of the fourth.  After 2 bars piano chords come in, which will form the basis of the verse and chorus melody; these sound like minor sixths a step or so apart.  A synth noise comes in before bass and a strong synth line drops at around the 0:40 mark.  I don't know how they're making the particular "shooting star" synth sound that floats over the beat, but how I would make it would be to hook up a feedback loop through my four-track, compress and distort the signal, and then play with a pitch shifter.  In addition, there are little whistles that play underneath.  The bass follows the piano chords.
 
It continues in this semi-dub fashion until the vocals kick in at 2:06, quieting down about 20 seconds before this.  A more contained version of the "shooting star" synth (sounds like a triangle/sine wave combo with a medium-length attack and then a decently long release, with some chorus in there too) doubles the melody, which settles around a strong tone (either the tonic or the fifth) at the end of the first three repetitions but then descends to a more illogical note at the end of the phrase.  There are two phrases.  The drum machine, bass, and piano continue under this, unaltered as it sounds like.  The first verse is followed by a short chorus, where the piano doubles the melody with the synth accenting the first note.  The melody is all sixteenths that is in some ways a double-time version of the regular verse melody, alternating between two close notes for the first two beats before proceeding stepwise down to a modulated repetition in the third beat and a descent to what I'm guessing is an augmented fifth (?) at the end.  It repeats four times.  The second verse and chorus proceed in exactly the same fashion.
 
There is then a break that starts with a beatless repetition of the chorus melody on piano and synth.  This happens twice.  Then there is a tempo and key shift and the piano and synth play the melody in a lower register for a few times before a counterpoint melody comes in on the synth.
 
Then there's a jump cut to the first bridge part, which is very short and does not occur again.  The backing is an acoustic guitar played with a slide alternating between two notes over tambourine with piano and kick/hat accents at the end of the bar.  Matthew[1] sings vocals here and they're not really a lead, just another interlocking part in this little hook, where the guitar and vocals dominate for the first half and then drop out to make room for the piano and hat.  It's all pretty precisely sequenced and very effective even in isolation.  The slide ascends rapidly at the end of the section and there's a very sudden cut to the second bridge section, a transition (lacking any percussion and suddenly charging to a new instrument) that's highly reminiscent of their live set.  This is the most bluesy part of the song, with a very strong electric guitar pentatonic riff forming the basis, more-or-less doubled by an acoustic.  A kick drum thump punctuates the section from time to time, and Eleanor sings an appropriately bluesy melody.  This repeats a few times and then there's a chord change that's much more Broadway than blues, although I can't identify it precisely.  The electric and acoustic play a palm-muted lower-string riff that sounds like a quick alternation between a sixth and a fifth interval.  Matthew picks the vocals back up and it's another mainly interlocking, three-note melody.  The electric breaks out at the end of the bar and hits some high open strings.  At the end of the section there's a descending sequence of quickly-picked notes leading to eighths, descending into the old chord, with a quick slide up after each note and a longer slide at the end leading back into the previous section.  These two sections repeat as before.
 
After this there's what I'm going to call "The Goddamn Inuit Section."  I don't really like TGIS.  The backing is actually pretty nice, with an arpeggiated finger-picked acoustic, bass and tambourine/kick on the 2/4 setting off a synth line that mirrors the pretty melody.  But good lord, it goes on two and a half minutes!  And you don't really know what she's saying!  Not much else happening besides some synth quivers, so let's move on.
 
After TGIS there's a short break that starts out with a synth/piano variation on the melody of the previous section which modulates into the chorus melody.  Then there's a slight slowdown as it goes into a sort of plodding, bassy rendition of the chorus with basic kick instead of the drum machine.  Then there's another break that's sort of a sea-whistle improv on the chorus melody, with no percussion.  Then back into the verse, which has no drum machine, but a pipe organ is added.  Matthew sings this.  Then they go into the chorus with no change in orchestration, with Eleanor singing her usual chorus bit and Matthew singing a new bit over that.  It then ends with a slower piano rendition of the chorus melody, with some left-hand accompaniment.
 
In chart form:
 
0:00-2:05 Intro
2:06-2:38 Verse 1 ("I had a locket..." to "...safe again.")
2:39-2:53 Chorus
2:54-3:27 Verse 2 ("Up to the quarantine..." to "...up a storm.")
3:28-3:42 Chorus ("We hid beneath..." to "...we're cast.")
3:43-4:27 Break 1 (chorus melody w/key + tempo change)
4:28-4:47 Bridge 1 - Matthew ("The clouds..." to "...Bay Madagascar[sic].")
4:48-4:56 Bridge 2A1 -Eleanor ("Great gulps..." to "...through the fluke.")
4:57-5:21 Bridge 2B1 - Matthew ("A lobby..." to "...Sir Edward Pepsi.")
5:22-5:40 Bridge 2A2 -Eleanor ("Course it wasn't..." to "...without any cares.")
5:41-6:05 Bridge 2B - Matthew (as before)
6:06-8:32 Bridge 3 -Eleanor (the "goddamn inuit bridge")
8:33-9:02 Break 2 (nautical melody of Bridge 3 moving into Chorus melody)
9:03-9:14 Chorus 3 ("And now we live..." to "...our general any more.")
9:15-9:26 Break 3
9:27-9:58 Verse 3  - Matthew ("Down came..." to "...eyes were dull.")
9:59-10:25 Chorus  - Matthew/Eleanor ("And as we pass..." to "...Barehaven to land" over "And now I'll never, never, never...") 
  
I'm warming to this song the more I listen to it, but looking at the structure, I can't help but notice the intro being 2 minutes long and TGIS being 2 and a half, and think that maybe there were some missed opportunities for edits here. 
 
ANALYSIS
 
The song begins with a girl being given a locket for protection.  The girl works the docks, presumably as a prostitute, and feels safe until one day a ne'er-do-well tears off the locket and throws it in the ocean. 
 
It then moves to a specific incident where the girl illegally sneaks onto a quarantined whaling (?(?) ship to get work, presumably because there's a captive audience as it were, but she finds that since the men can't get off the ship, her attempts to exploit the situation are stymied by the fact that the men do not have access to any additional cash besides what they have on them.  She and her fellow prostitutes are waiting for the "all-clear" sign that no authorities are watching so they can get off the boat, but a storm comes up and they are trapped on the boat, hiding behind barrels of blubber.  The storm is very fierce, and they are cast out to sea, which they think is because the anchor has broken, but it is in fact because they have been towed by, apparently, Bornean natives.  They are sold, possibly into slavery, at Kobaba, which I'm going to guess is a port in Japan, but it could also be a misspelling of "Kobala," which is in the Netherlands.  Let's all just chalk this up to poetic license and go with the Japan thing.
 
Meanwhile, we're also getting the perspective of a male crewmember who was, apparently, recruited for his skilled and then pressed into service by an aristocrat with the unlikely (and, indeed, made-up) name of "Sir Edward Pepsi." 
 
After being sold, everyone bands together (or so it seems--both the male and female voices tell of an escape) to bribe the guards, slip down a chimney, and to reclaim their whaler, which they take north, apparently to wherever they speak Inuit, i.e. Alaska.  The girl then either stays with the Eskimos for a while or already knows their language (seafaring father?  Of Eskimo stock already?) because she's able to give a bunch of narration in said language.  The crew finds themselves in dire straits (har har har)--the rigging breaks, they have no food, but five survive until they run aground in Barehaven, which is either in Ireland or Newfoundland, but given the context I'm going to go with Newfoundland.  

All in all, aside from the Inuit section which I can't tell about, it's a whole coherent story, and a fairly interesting one, even if the moments of drama are a bit more buried in the music than they are in other songs--"Blueberry Boat" or "Chief Inspector Blancheflower," say.  Speaking of which (the music, I mean) the music here mainly serves as a reinforcement to the lyrics.  Maybe I need to listen a bit more closely, but I don't hear a lot of instances of the backing either counterpointing or commenting critically on the vocals.  Mainly it just does what it's supposed to do: it sounds nautical in the nautical sections, slightly menacing in the sections about being unsafe, fast and exciting in the escape parts, etc.   
 
CONTEXT 
 
The setting here is unclear.  On the one hand, all signs point to a Pacific setting, except for the very European language of the dockside stuff ("killicks," "Sir Robert Pepsi," etc.).  So there are two options: either they began in England and were towed to the Pacific straits, which seems unlikely, or they were in some European protectorate of an Asian country.  I'm going to go vaguely with the latter, but I don't think it matters so much; it's mainly important that they start out in a Western setting, move into an Eastern setting, and take a detour in a Native setting.  (Using archetypes here because I think it's the most useful thing.)

The way I'm going to frame this, going with the three-storylines idea I mentioned in the intro, is that this is a primary narration for Matthew's character, which is a future incarnation of the one introduced in "Blancheflower."  Eleanor's character, however, is an ancestor of her character in "Blueberry Boat," and her verses of the song are that character's narration of her family history.  I think Matthew's character remains consistent throughout and their occasional intersections culminate in the present-day suburban stuff which isn't present here but which we'll see later, mainly in "Chris Michaels" and "Blancheflower."
 
The song does a very good job of introducing a number of themes on the album, which I think is the best explanation for the placement of a somewhat confusing and relatively less hooky 10-minute track in the leadoff spot.  It certainly does a good job of presenting the general nautical theme of the album, which is an interesting contrast with Gallowsbird's Bark, since in that album the narrator seemed to leap from place to place with little mention of transport.  On Blueberry Boat, the transport plays a key role, and that's one reason why there's more languid sections in this album than on Gallowsbird's.  Additionally, there are the first signs here of Matthew's playing with Victorian language and European settings. 

I should mention the title, since it's actually pretty good.  In the context of the song, "Quay Cur" likely refers to the "killick" who stole the girl's locket, since quay=dock, cur=scoundrel.  But, of course, it also is a homonym for "Quaker," the American religion known as the "Society of Friends" which is pacifist and generally kind of hippie, and who had a large role in the founding of Pennsylvania.  So this suggests a few things (even while quay cur itself suggests both the various port-based situations on the album as well as the general theme of malfeasence that crops up in almost every song).  Aside from fitting in with the suggestion of religion that lurks behind their name, maybe the most direct reference on the album is to "My Dog Was Lost," which aside from explicitly stealing a line from the African-American spiritual "Amazing Grace," also ends up in a distinctly Pentecostal situation, I think, although more on this later.  So there's a fascination, I think, with uniquely American religions, which is also at the heart of the blues, a form the Furnaces play with a lot.  But at the same time, the Quakers were religious outlaws who emigrated to America.  Most of the movement in this album seems to be from America to Europe, actually, but I think it touches nicely on the theme of immigration and movement across national borders that's probably important in some way I haven't figured out yet.

So that's "Quay Cur."  Doing it has suggested a few things I might want to do in the future, like note in the structural layout when there's tempo or key changes, or to maybe do a bit more analysis, but eh, let's go with this.  "Straight Street" next.

UPDATE: Matthew has a translation of the Inuit bridge (#3).

half hour sandglass / seven saker round shot/ ice for the moonshine / and chichsaneg / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch / look yonder / get out my knife / I mean no harm, I mean no harm / weave us on shore / give it, give it to me / will you have / and I gave a bracelet / kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, don't say no / tie tight my coat / in comes the fog / fallen down in the sea, go fetch
 
"Chichsaneg" is the only word that I cannot find anywhere online - my guess is that it is some kind of food or beverage. Also, I am not sure if a "sasobneg" is strictly defined as being a bracelet. I suspect that it may be a reference to the lost locket from the beginning of the song.

I think this adds something to the context, but not necessarily to the plot of the song itself, aside from confirming that Eleanor's character did, in fact, spend some time with the residents there.  I'll work it into my final storyline, although I haven't entirely processed yet Matthew's excellent point about the bracelet and the locket...at any rate, go check it out.

posted by Mike B. at 5:55 PM 0 comments

Monday, July 19, 2004

How would music be different if there was a league commissioner?

It's been said that professional sports leagues are the most socialist things in American life: profit sharing, regulated market expansion, strict trade laws, and mutually agreed-upon operating principles. Like music, they're a form of leisure activity which has been made into a profitable thing to ask people for money to experience, and both are now big businesses. The difference is that the vast majority of professional sports in this country are controlled by five or six organizations; indeed, if you're not working for an organization that is a member, you'll have a hard time making a case that you're actually a professional. Whereas with music, that line is much more finely drawn. There are tens of thousands of professional musicians that don't answer to the RIAA, or often even the FCC, whereas the vast majority of football players (and team owners) have to do what the NFL tells them to.

Sure, that means they're a monopoly (or close to one, anyway), but why use that dirty word when there's such a nicer one: leagues. With music, we have labels and companies and distributors; with sports we have teams and leagues and players. So much nicer!

Yes, it's a bit ridiculous: it's a lot harder for two teams to play against each other and to then compete in a league without semi-universal, mutually agreed-upon rules than for a band to play a show. But that's the one aspect that's not useful to consider. So think, for a second: what would it be like if music was a league?

The main thing to consider is that the reason sports have leagues is not to maximize profits. Well, OK, it sort of it, but it's a second-order thing: in order to maximize profits for everyone, that means they have to maximize competition, so in a free market system where one team had all the money and therefore all the best players, there would be no competition, which means there would be no entertainment value, which means there'd be a lot less revenue for everyone. It's a demonstrable fact[1] that in seasons where the races are tighter, there's more ticket sales, there's more TV viewers, there's more merch sales, etc. Competition is a large part of what makes sports interesting to watch, and a bunch of lopsided contests is bore-city. Oddly enough, a monopolistic superstructure[2] exists in order to make sure the market it regulates is productively competitive.

In music, this impetus does not exist; individual companies, having no need to serve the narrative of pop (if you will), can do things like cut off the nose to spite the face, or have such disproportionate resources that there's no need to develop a long-term strategy. If there was profit sharing and regulation of "trades," then this would not only limit the overall expenditures of individual labels--definitely a good thing since it would calm down the marketing/promo "arms race" that produces some of the biz's worst outrages--but it would ensure that labels had to foster some mid-level or even small-market talent; it would make a lot more smooth, in other words, the whole idea of a "farm system" that's incredibly crucial to artist development, whether the talent came from subsidiary labels or indies.

Of course, one of the reasons labels don't do this currently is because it's to their advantage to sign acts that a) don't know much about the business and b) negotiate from a position of almost total weakness so they accept terms that are sort of punitive of success. But if there was a league, that would make a non-studio musician's union[3] a viable propositon, because there would be a unitary entity to negotiate. The end of the reserve clause and advent of free agency in Major League Baseball (an absolutely fascinating thing, by the way, for the non-sports-fans out there) happened in part, I think, because there was something concrete to challenge. While a lot of contractual abuses are standardized in the record business, they're not really dictated from above or in collective bargaining agreements. If music was constituted as a league, a lot of the really ridiculous employment outrages in the biz right now--a label being able to shelve a record but not drop a band, or retain the rights to a band name and not allow the band to record under that name for another label, or to have absurdly long terms on new-artist contracts[4]--would, I think, have to disappear. You might even get pension plans or healthcare or uniform termination procedures, but let's not go nuts.

Finally, professional sports has done the neat trick of convincing people that they're good for the community, and as such they've been uniquely successful at getting goverment to contribute to their operating expenses, mainly by giving them land, subsidizing their facilities, building roads, and so forth. The actual economic benefit of these sorts of efforts is highly debatable, but for our purposes, this kicks ass, considering how amazingly unsuccessful Americans have been at getting public subsidies for the arts. Let's look at the Swedish system and how oddly productive that's been! Even better, we could get stronger subsidies for music education (at least as strong as the subsidies sports get!) as well as public support for struggling musicians so they could concentrate on their music, to say nothing of being able to helping out indie labels just barely staying above water.[5] We could harness some of that public goodwill (massive public rock concerts as a source of revenue, vital music scenes generating tourist dollars, rock/jazz/blues/hip-hop music as a uniquely American tradition) and turn it into cash, cash, cash!

Of course, there are also negative aspects to this model. Record labels are a lot cheaper to start than professional sports teams, and so the idea of regulating expansion would be very restrictive. You could also argue that since league offices currently regulate TV contracts, a music league might end up regulating all music licensing, which would suck, given the productive revenue/promotion source it's become.

But of course, it'll never happen. Still, there would be some nice things about it, wouldn't there?

[1] That I am too lazy to Google right now.
[2] Ah, I'm going to hell.
[3] AFTRA/AFM are very nice, but they haven't really adapted well to the new model, to say nothing of the fact that it's a pretty big burden on indie labels or small studios to deal with the regulations and fees that go with using AFM/AFTRA talent.
[4] Football has, I believe, a five- or seven-year term on new player contracts; a major label new-artist deal could last for 10 years if they were successful and reasonably productive, and how many bands have careers longer than 10 years?
[5] Unless they're Sub Pop. Those guys were just stupid.

posted by Mike B. at 6:42 PM 0 comments

BB #00: INTRODUCTION

For the next however-long, I'm going to attempt to do something of a guide to the new Fiery Furnaces album, Blueberry Boat. I usually focus on doing analyses of singles, but I think in this particular case there really is something to be gleaned from trying to consider it as a kind of whole, as I mentioned before. At the same time, I don't want to do it in the traditional rock-crit way of sort of picking and choosing bits that fit the case and ignoring other stuff; I want to look at it as a series of linked singles, as it were. And so I can't really dump all of this out at once--while it will eventually be collated into a whole, I think in the spirit of the blog, I want to do each song as an entry. So, time permitting, that's what I'm going to do.

Each entry will consist of three parts:

STRUCTURE

This will be, pretty basically, a narrative rendition of the arrangement of each song, followed by a chart/formula laying out the structure. Given the insane number of sections the songs on this album incorporate, I think it'll be very useful here, rather than merely revelatory, as it might be for other albums. It's less that seeing the structure will aid in understanding why the song works and more that I need to understand what the hell is actually going on in the song before I can hope to get a grasp of it. For a decent example of this, see my "Electric Version" entry.

ANALYSIS

This will be a discussion of what's going on in the song, musically, lyrically, and at the intersection of the two. Hooks and hidden hooks and odd little turns and sudden choruses and all the usual clap clap claptrap.

CONTEXT

I think you can--or, rather, that it's interesting to--construct a coherent narrative or two or three out of this album, and this section will attempt to reconcile what's going on in the song to the larger plot of the album. Basically, I think there are three "settings" on this album: East Asian seaports, Western Europe and certain parts of the Medditeranean (contemporary for Eleanor, ancien for Matthew) and the American suburbs (slightly past-tense for Eleanor, present-day for Matthew). (Note: I can't see any character names in there for the narrators, so for purposes of clarity, I'm just going to use the singers' names.) What's interesting here is which are used as framing devices and which are memories and which are fantasies and the way that they slip into each other, much like how the music changes without warning. There are a few different ways you can construct this, and maybe I'll try and pursue multiple paths, but I also might not. We'll see where it goes, eh?

posted by Mike B. at 6:16 PM 0 comments

Speaking of Klosterman, that Metallica-goes-into-therapy movie (i.e. Some Kind of Monster) kind of sucked. And by "sucked," I mean, "was not very enjoyable to watch," not "failed to acheive some kind of purpose," although more on that later.

Mainly it sucked in this particular way because it was 2 and a half hours, a fact that has been oddly left out of other reviews I've read. Miss Clap thought there was only really one redeeming sequence in there (the art sale), but I really could assemble a great 80-90 minutes of moments and context that, for me at least, would be fantastic documentary. But at 150 minutes, man, it really wore you down. And I don't think it's because I'm not a huge Metallica fan (although, contrary to what has been said in other reviews, I think it does help a good bit if you're at least a metal fan, if not actually a Metallica fan. Or, I don't know, care about metal somewhat. Prior interests helps, is what I'm saying), since I think it would have been way worse if I was a Metallica fan. It would have been even more painful.

I seriously left the theater considering a career change--to go into finance, or grad school for the professoriat, or something. It made it just seem like a horrible thing to be a successful musician, so crushing and stultifying and difficult to get anything done because so many people want things. And any tensions that are there in the band, any tensions, they become such a huge deal that they prevent you from doing what you love. For all that they refer to the band as a "family," it's like a family going into business together--it can work out really badly. Plus, they're not, you know, actually a family.[1]

I dunno, maybe this is my own hang-ups, but spending so much time in such a sterile studio, working on songs in this un-intimate environment, and being there for, what, 600 days, doing an album that's not really that complex (or, for my money, remotely as good or interesting as Load [which I really liked] or Metallica) sounds like a good definition of hell. For all that I like collective creations, I think there's a necessary balance between that and creating in your own private space, just following your own instincts where they lead. And sometimes you can do that with a band, but a lot of the time you can't. Plus, they didn't play any gigs! You saw how much that bugged them, but geez, I can't really go for a month without playing a gig without feeling really antsy.

And, of course, then it culminates in these really depressing gigs. I guess I don't know entirely why it was so depressing, although it might be connected to the shots where you couldn't even see the back of the goddamn stadium, which, again, sounds like hell. It just sounded like shit, too, and I do like Metallica. Plus how fucked up all that James stuff was, where, yes, he really did need to spend more time with his kids, but also, yes, he really needed to spend more than 4 hours in the studio. Yoing. This is why I build up songs for later in case something like that should happen...

I dunno. I guess I'm not doing a very good job of articulating exactly why it was so soul-crushingly depressing. But Jesus, it really was. Talking to someone recently, they mentioned how hard it is to be a rock star, because you're suddenly the reason for existing of this entire corporation, but you don't really have control over it unless you want to go all MacKaye. That's sort of what you're seeing here, but it's sort of not, since Metallica did manage to thrive for a while under just that structure.[2] But maybe--and I'm being a bit more generous than I really think is deserved here--a realization like that was kind of the point. For all the talk of this not being for metalheads because the movie laughs at Metallica, so do metalheads--or, at least, laugh at the present incarnation of Metallica. I certainly remember the fuss in true believer-land about Load's genre experimentation. So maybe all this crushing horrendousness is a sort of commentary on "corporate rock" as it were.

Then again, maybe it was just shitty editing.

At any rate, there were two fantastic sequences which I want to point out.

One was, of course, the one noted in other reviews, where, as part of the therapy, Lars was confronted by Dave Mustaine. This is one of the few places in the movie where a prior knowledge was useful, because, damn, it was kind of shocking just to see them talking to each other in that context, and when Dave just starts in on the way getting kicked out of the band has affected his life, it's incredibly powerful. I mean, granted, Dave is not the most stable person in the world--no one who's done that much freebasing can be, really. And sure, maybe he was playing to the cameras. But regardless, to see him talk about how much it's meant to his life not to have been in Metallica (and to have been, instead, in Megadeath, a band that sold a mere three [?] million records) is simultaneously absurd--something about walking down the street and hearing people say, "Woo, Metallica!" and it really bothering him--and absurdly logical, in a purely dramatic, even cliched, way. Of course it bothers him; of course it's had that big of an effect on his life. He got kicked out of fuckin' Metallica, dude, and shit how fucked up do you have to be to get kicked out of that band?

The other thing is what happens after they ask Ozzy's bassist, Robert Trujillo (who looks just disarmingly like a guy I knew in college named Gael) to join the band. Specifically, they show not only the introductory talk when they tell him that he's going to get a million dollar advance (!) against future profits (!), but they also show the meeting between the four band members (in beanbag chairs, if I'm recalling correctly, although maybe this is just wishful thinking) and their lawyers to hash out the new corporate agreement that incorporates Trujillo. The lawyers are clearly very uncomfortable having the cameras in the room, and, fuck, no wonder: for me, at least, it was absolutely shocking to see those kind of closely-guarded details on public display. I want to go back and watch it again and again and nail down exactly how they worked that shit out. Sounds like Trujillo was going to get a 5% voting stake that would then increase a bit per period until he was a full equity member. That gave him voting rights and, I'm assuming, his portion of profits, with none of the pre-existing projects collatoralized against his stake. Yoinks! It's sort of engaging me to write about it in isolation like this (I sure wish we knew more about how this sort of shit worked before we're actually in the situation ourselves), but in the context of the contentious studio sessions and the band maintaining purely professional relationships--which it seemed like would be the extent of Trujillo's participation in the "family"--it was deeply unsettling, sort of like watching people haggling over a corpse, somehow. Not to mention the part where Jason sends word that he wouldn't mind rejoining and they straight-up reject him...iee!

So it's maybe a DVD pick, but in the theaters, I dunno, skip it unless you want to discuss it right now. Uh, that's my review. Hey.

[1] There was a sorta-good essay on the band-dynamic subject that made this point in the This Is Pop collection, which I might comment on at some juncture.
[2] This makes me realize, I guess, just how nice it is to be Bjork or PJ Harvey or Beck or Steven Malkmus or someone like that--someone who's acheived both mid-level commercial success and critical success, so you can basically do whatever you want without people being too concerned about it making oodles of money, and have some influence without it being so powerful that people can reasonably ask you for things aside from your kind attention. Then again, at least 3 of the people I mention have been very good (or lucky, depending on your point of view) at managing their careers...

posted by Mike B. at 5:13 PM 0 comments

More full posts shortly, but for now: as noted in the comments below, John has done his own take on the whole 100 random songs thing. If you do one, drop me a line in comments or e-mail and I'll post it here!

posted by Mike B. at 4:50 PM 0 comments

With effusive thanks to our usual secret contributor (Haverchuck/Graham in '04!), here is the latest Klosterman piece, about the Olympics, sorta.

Something of an odd piece for Chuck, stylistically--it's a straight rant with no on-the-other-hand turnabout at the end.  He just really doesn't like fandom.

posted by Mike B. at 2:39 PM 0 comments

Two notes on the aforementioned Billy Joel song, "It's Still Rock 'n' Roll To Me":
 
1) I really picked it to sing because I wanted to sing a non-ballad Billy Joel song.  (I wanted to sing a Billy Joel song because I love Billy Joel.)  I hadn't really expected it to "work," really, I just wanted it to be the same kind of fun, dance-like-an-idiot sort of thing I usually get with my kareoke selections, i.e. "Pretty Woman" or "Love Shack" or things of that sort.  But it really did work in that context, much to my surprise; I started off just singing it, but by the end I was sort of snarling/yelling the chorus.

The song itself seems like a transparent Joel conservative move, of "man, all this new music is just good ol' rock."  Which is sort of a justified stance for him to take, given his history, but is also sort of annoying.  But the whole thing becomes weird when you sing it about retro revivals, because...well, look:
 
Where have you been hidin' out lately, honey?
You can't dress trashy till you spend a lot of money.
 
And then, later:
 
Hot funk, cool punk, even if it's old junk
It's still rock and roll to me
 
And also:
 
"Should I try to be a straight 'A' student?"
"If you are then you think too much
Don't you know about the new fashion honey?
All you need are looks and a whole lotta money"
It's the next phase, new wave , dance craze, anyways
It's still rock and roll to me
 
So I dunno.  It seems grumpy-old-manish when it first hits, and it's still that to a degree, but while it wasn't really true at the time (punk was quite consciously not what "rock 'n' roll" had come to mean), today we remember these movements but meld them quite freely.  Electroclash is presenting itself as a faithful revival but is really only taking a few old elements and adding a bunch more.  Some stuff might sound just like the Human League or Suicide or Blondie, but for every imitator there's something that really is a new sound, or as much of a new sound as you can reasonably expect.  And a large part of this new sound, interestingly enough in the context of Joel's song, comes from rock.  It is all rock, but...it's not.
 
2) I think I've liked this song longer than I've liked any non-Beatles pop song.  I had to do a report on some pop band for music class in sixth grade (this would be about 1990), but I really didn't like any at the time.  My parents suggested Billy Joel, I'm still not entirely sure why--maybe because I was listening to some 50s rock at the time, maybe because I liked songwriter-y things, maybe because I liked the Beatles, I dunno--and so I went with that.  (It was a partner project, and my partner was overjoyed that I did all the work, even though he had no idea who Billy Joel was.)  In retrospect, this is really weird.  Not only was I not doing it about Guns 'n' Roses or New Kids or something, not only was I doing it about an album 10 years old (I think I actually focued on Glass Houses), I was doing it about something that had no cachet whatsoever.  It's not like I brought in Mozart or old jazz or something like that as my alternative to present-day pop.  I brought in...Billy Joel.  I was a weird kid.  I guess I still am.  But I do still like Billy Joel a lot.
 
2a) Tangentally: do you think Paul Simon is pissed off because Billy Joel's musical is doing fairly well and his bombed?

posted by Mike B. at 1:53 PM 0 comments

THINGS LEARNED AT KAREOKE, 7/17/04
 
1) You never know what kind of crowd it's going to be.  Who would think that you'd be in a "Sister Christian" kind of crowd, but then you are, and you just have to go with that.  But seriously: fucking "Sister Christian"?  Weird.
 
2) "Secret Agent Man" does sound better sung by a young Japanese man in, for some reason, an eyepatch.  Plus, he's a regular, he's not just wearing it for the song.
 
3) Sometimes the best response to a bunch of looky-loos drawn by a New York Times article is to sing a Billy Joel song.

posted by Mike B. at 1:46 PM 0 comments

I've always been a bit ambivalent about the Mountain Goats for some reason--sure, I love individual songs, but the whole rhetoric of Darnielle-as-speed-freak just never made much sense to me.  I mean, besides the charming domesticity that sneaks into LPTJ (which I do love unreservedly) I just don't see it in the songs.  Sure, he plays the guitar and sings pretty fast, but he's way too coherent for speed freakery.[1] I know what speed freaks sound like and it's just not "Going to California."  It's not even the truly awe-inspiring (and certainly ADD-ish) "Cubs in Five."  It's Slayer, or Japanther, or something.  There's a certain cult of personality around the Goats, and while I appreciate said cults (I do love pop, after all) I just haven't been able to suspend disbelief, as it were, the perfection of "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton"[2] aside.
 
But I do love "Dance Music" in a way that almost makes me want to buy into it.  Because it's so very good; it does so many things that I want a song to do.  It tells a very archetypical story (which allows him to say more than he would be able to normally, which is the pop lyricist's stock-in-trade; you have to allude to elements of a well-known narrative in order to do anything other than present an image in those few lines you're allotted) in a specific, and, for its genre, somewhat new way.  There are the elements of real speech ("five years old, or six, maybe"), the mix of abstract imagery with specificity ("indications that there's something wrong with our new house trip down the wire twice daily"), and the particular move from concrete-but-overused image into one that has too many unique details to be cliche ("in the living room watching the Watergate hearings while my stepfather yells at my mother / launches a glass across the room straight at her head and I dash upstairs to take cover").  And that's just the first verse.  In subsequent verses it does something else key: it takes the setup of the first verse into different areas.  There's this particular scenario/behavior established for the character, and then the 2nd verse (which is a bit more imagistic and less narrative than the first verse) shows how this plays out in his life 12 years later.  That particular movement that comes in at the end of vagueness into archetype, causing both to coalesce into specificity ("there's only one place this road ever ends up / and I don't want to die alone / let me down let me down let me down gently/ and when the police come to get me/I'm listening to / dance music.") works really well here.
 
As does something else: the charge of the verse into the chorus, which is short--two words, with two different melodies thereof--but a sort of revelatory summation of the semi-realism of the verses.  Realism doesn't obviously summate, usually, so when you can do it, and do it in a way that isn't really obvious from what's come before (what does domestic violence have to do with dance music?), that's a great little trick, because you're proving a point.  You're saying, this is about the chorus, about the title, because I say it is, and do you see it?  Melody helps, too, of course, and melody and rhyme can do a lot to convince you of things that aren't really true.[3] 
 
But this is true.  It's a story that's been told before, of course--I mean, Glitter--but only in some ways.  Music-as-escape is a constant theme of, well, music, but for an indie/folk/let's just say "non-electronic" song to be talking about the escapatory qualities of dance music is kind of new.  Darnielle's not new at this sort of thing, of course, but at the same time he does it very well here.  The kind of music doesn't necessarily matter; as funny as it might seem for someone to rebel by listening to Mozart, in some cases that might well be true.  But I'm saying rebel when the subject here is escape, and that can always happen, especially with a genre as particularly escapist as dance music.  There's something to be praised in that kind of sonic utopianism, and Darnielle alludes to it even if he doesn't say it outright.  It's a praise that is not given as often as it should.
 
But of course the other thing that's different here is how he's showing that this very escapism doesn't really matter.  Not only does it not change your life for the better, it doesn't serve as some sort of Hornbyesque emotional shield either.  It's not a regressive thing because the consequences we see occur when the narrator is 17, and there's nothing to really regress to.  He couches his particular situation in very dance music-y terms--which is to say, oddly enough, vague, abstract, and universal, eschewing personal narrative for inclusiveness (which isn't really necessary, but never mind for now).  But it isn't salvation; his childhood has still fucked him up, and the only role for the music here is really to be playing when the cops arrive.  
 
What is going on in that second verse?  There's talk of paths and alleyways which may or may not be literal, and a certain determinism ("there's only one place...") and a crime is clearly committed, you'd be inclined to guess something related to domestic violence, although there's not so much textual evidence for that.  The one thing that ties it in is that last line before the prechorus chords kick in: "...and I don't want to die alone."  Now what would a 17-year-old care about that?  It seems like something driven by the heightened romanticism of dance music, that particular fear of emptiness and loneliness that it chases off so well sometimes.  So maybe the music has an effect after all.

ADDENDUM: Boy, didn't talk about the music much, did I?  But I think that's a bit part of my love for this song.  The simple fact that it's based around piano rather than guitar takes Darnielle out of his more familiar element, I think, and the particular DUM-dugga-dugga acoustic guitar rhythm that forms the basis of a lot of his songs isn't here, which is both refreshing and good for the song, regardless of who's playing it.  It leaves a space for the vocals and it makes the rests in the chorus that much more notable.  I don't know if it's Dance Music, but it does have a groove, which at least makes it as good as Guns 'n' Roses.  Uh, sorta.
 
[1] Plus a certain cohort of mine wrote a batch of songs while on the aforementioned substance once and they were all fairly languid in parts. 
[2] I'm relistening to this, and one of the names suggested for said band is "The Killers."  Ha!
[3] I've always been a lot more interested in this than in all the semiotics claptrap about the falsity of seemingly truthful images.  Images encourage processing; melody and rhyme doesn't so much.  But never mind.

posted by Mike B. at 12:10 PM 0 comments