[OK Go!]
It’s been a while
The Strokes – Taken For A Fool
What if the statement lyric on the best song off your most critical album — Dare we call it a comeback? We dare. — was a lie?
“It’s so early I don’t want to wake up./We’re so lucky because we never grow up,” Julian Casablancas sings 105 seconds into “Taken For A Fool.”
Which: fine and inspiring and let’s go drink on the LES until well past 12:51. Etc.
But also: totally, completely, and most importantly, obviously untrue.
Grown up problems defined the making of “Angles.” I know this. You know this. Anyone with a passing interest in the state of Music White People Like knows this. The spider web fractures that extended during the post Is This It years finally broke. Four out of five Strokes recorded the album while Casablancas filled in his parts from afar.
Put the feelings of the group on a scale between love and hate, and you’ll find the weight tilting toward the latter.
A line from 2001: “The Strokes, even on their debut album, sound like experienced professionals for whom mastering the form seems only an album away.”
Three albums later, the existence of Angles indicates the professionalism remains but simultaneously demonstrates how unmastered the form is.
A decade ago — which, you know, sometimes seems like it was only last night — Casablancas knew for sure he was walking out that door.
To where never really mattered.
He knows now where the exit leads. Occasionally, you get the impression he wishes it was all just a dream.
Or maybe just a lie.
[Purchase.]
Time after time
Camera Obscura – If Looks Could Kill
“You act like a man who is cross with every woman he’s never had,” spits a singer with lilt styling. Such as the sound of beneath-our-feet partying, it’s those mad murmurs of the song’s opening chapter, with acute symmetry, vibration, and pacing, that offer the pull and grab action. “If Looks Could Kill” is less an appeal to our neediness for catchiness and hook satisfaction (although ironically present in sweet abundance), but more an immediate call to the purity of our heart strings. It’s a familiar sound with a not so familiar reaction. In the same way your mother’s favourite vinyl has those aging melodies that offers up such a touching level of tenderness, Camera Obscura give us the same, cocooned by what we know: storming chords, a swaggering bass line exuding all the energy and greed of a violent punch, and that embrace-happy melody, too. Such utterly flavourful vocal melody. Good song writing is a fortunate thing. [Elefant ER-1123 CD and LP / Merge MRG276.]
Go long, go long, go long!
Last night, again,
you were in my dreams
several expendable limbs were at stake
you were a prince, spinning rims
all sentiments Indian-given
and half-baked
I was brought
in on a palanquin
made of the many bodies
of beautiful women
brought to this place to be examined,
swaying on an elephant:
a princess of India.
We both want the very same thing.
We are praying
I am the one to save you
But you don’t even own,
your own violence
Run away from home –
your beard is still blue
with the loneliness of you mighty men,
with your jaws, and fists, and guitars
and pens, and your sugar-lip,
but I’ve never been to the fire-pits with you mighty men
Who made you this way?
Who made you this way?
Who is going to bear your beautiful children?
Do you think you can just stop,
when you’re ready for a change?
Who will take care of you
when you’re old and dying?
You burn in the Mekong,
to prove your worth,
Go Long! Go Long!
Right over the edge of the earth!
You have been wronged,
tore up since birth.
You have done harm.
Others have done worse.
Will you tuck your shirt?
Will you leave it loose?
You are badly hurt.
You’re a silly goose.
You are caked in mud,
and in blood, and worse.
Chew your bitter cud,
grope your little nurse.
Do you know why
my ankles are bound in gauze
(sickly dressage:
a princess of Kentucky)?
In the middle of the woods
(which were the probable cause),
we danced in the lodge
like two panting monkeys.
I will give you a call, for one last hurrah.
If this tale is tall, forgive my scrambling.
But you keep palming along the wall,
moving at a blind crawl,
but always rambling.
Wolf-spider, crouch in your funnel nest,
If I knew you, once,
now I know you less,
In the sinking sand,
where we’ve come to rest,
have I had a hand in your loneliness?
When you leave me alone
in this old palace of yours,
it starts to get to me. I take to walking,
What a woman does is open doors.
And it is not a question of locking
or unlocking.
Well, I have never seen
such a terrible room –
gilded with the gold teeth
of the women who loved you!
Now, though I die,
Magpie, this I bequeath:
by any other name
a jay is still blue
With the loneliness
of you mighty men,
with your mighty kiss
that might never end,
while, so far away,
in the seat of the west,
burns the fount
of the heat
of that loneliness.
There’s a man
who only will speak in code,
backing slowly, slowly down the road.
May he master everything
that such men may know
about loving, and then letting go.
The highs won’t bring you down
To be taken to the moon and back: ethereal. I want to be in a position to never let her down. [Buy ‘Wounded Rhymes’.]
Driving eyes closed
Iron & Wine – Godless Brother In Love
I’ve been having troubles praying.
What does one tell an omniscient being? As a child, I tended to use prayers as a verbal diary. But God already saw all of it happen; why waster her (infinite) time by retelling it?
(I prefer the maternal characteristics of God, so mine is a woman. And goddam her rack is divine.)
Other times I just show up with a list of requests/demands. I scrawl down a shopping list and pray it off one by one. Here, God – take your pick between a better job situation, a clearer idea with what I’m doing with my life next month, happiness, maybe a hot ladyfriend?, and a parking spot. (That last one’s not actually such a frivolous request in San Francisco.) Oh wait, let me throw a cure for cancer on the list too. And don’t forget all of Africa and that rape will go away. Not world peace, though, that’s just cliche. OK, genie God, if you’re going to grant one of my wishes, I’d suggest the rape one, but I really hope you ignore that for one more day longer and do the parking one. Or at least the ladyfriend one – we can just drive away together before I park, that’s fine.
I end up feeling too demanding if all I’m praying about is to ask for stuff, so I try to fill in other things. Maybe praise? I hear she’s egotistical and loves that. “Dear God, you’re super swell. Given my monotheistic upbringing, you’re the best god in the whole wide universe!”
Then, of course, I get distracted thinking about how God feels. She’s up there in heaven anyways, where my actions can’t actually make her any happier. Is heaven just constant ecstasy, a thousand simultaneous orgasms? Or is God more like a warm mist of contentment, the satisfaction of knowing things are going exactly according to plan?
My main problem, I think, is how to address God. “Dear” sounds too formal and stuffy, like I’m writing a pen-pal on an a loudly clanking typewriter and might use “forsooth” in my next paragraph. “Hey” is far too familiar, and reminds me that my writing has no range, that I can only do the diction of a middle-class American convincingly. Ditto “wassup.”
Sometimes I ask God how she’d like me to address her, if there’s a preference or maybe a non-offensive standard. I wait in silence for a reply. Does that silent meditation count as prayer? I wonder if yoga is a form of prayer. Then I think about doing yoga with Brie, and how we drank honeyed whiskey which reminded me of amber nectar. I walked home in the rain, and the tiny beads were refreshingly freezing on my forehead.
. . . Oh shit, none of these thoughts are prayers.
“Dear God, help me stay on track. Help me to . . .” Whoa, is that an open parking spot? [Kiss Each Other Clean.]
Why can’t you be true?
Sliding down the driveway in slippers with your arms flailing and your neighbors are watering their begonias. Ah! Your knees won’t stop kicking. You’re playing air-guitar in your underwear and slapping the arms off of your lounge-chairs. You’re smiling. It’s that morning and you have that highway sound in your lungs. Your neighbor looks over, bemused. You stretch that smile a half-mile wider and yell, “Fuck, we’re good! We’re so good. We’re better than anybody has ever been and you have one option: get in the fucking car and scream!” [Maybellene!]
I will be there, I promise to take care of you
With sanguine complexion and organ-whisper seduction, “Pigeon” works as the prettiest of the pretty. A welcomed premature addition to 2011, with its summery disposition and tender call to experienced love, “been reaching for my baby / close hauling with my darlin’.” The sound captured is one of complete assurance and control, a tenderness promised to truer feelings, and not a longing for time spent, but a swaying celebration of the joys of adventure.
One-way transmission
Dillon’s facebook profile was bare, lacking even a picture, except for the interests section. It read: One-way Transmissions.
He wasn’t exactly sure where he learned of the idea. Maybe he first thought it up while swinging upside down on the monkey bars, wondering about the people who sent messages in bottles. What if someone read it, but the author never got the reply? Was the message any less powerful if it had touched the reader?
Dillon decided it was even more meaningful then, imbued with a heart-breaking loneliness; trees in the woods let out an horrifying shriek when they fall and no one is around to hear.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower was, of course, Dillon’s favorite book. He sent his first message in a bottle aged 10. He hadn’t fastened a top, so it sank as he watched, but that didn’t deter him. Maybe someone lived at the bottom of the pond and would find it.
Everyone needs to find ways of filling the time from one sleep to the next. Instead of wasting them staring at pixels morphing on a screen, like you or me, Dillon sent transmissions. He scrawled them with sharpie on index cards and slid them into library books. He found addresses in Hong Kong and Tokyo and mailed lengthy letters with no return address. Once he wrote a 90-page novella about a lonely bull-fighter who wishes the bull would spear him so that at least a doctor would touch him and ask how he feels. He clanked it out on a typewriter over the course of three sleepless nights, shoved the only copy in a manila envelope, and shipped it to an address he had found in Prague.
Eventually, like with all pursuits, Dillon grew out of his hobby. It was a gradual thing. He started making more friends, life introduced him to stressors, there was just less of him emotionally to share with strangers. By the time he went to college, Dillon was a socially competent, albeit nerdy, kid, and he hadn’t sent a one-way transmission in over a year.
Then one day, back from class, he stopped by his mailbox – one tiny cubbyhole in a wall of hundreds. He twisted his key and distractedly pulled out the wad of junk mail. When he got to his room, he threw the pile onto his keyboard. One postcard slipped and fell to the floor, so he picked it up. On the front was a nondescript beach. On the back, someone had written in big block letters: HEY. No return address.
Once was gone
Karen O And The Kids – Hideaway
All the people were elated too on the small farms around the lakes for weeks after Fraser Woods had tried to hang himself from a branch of an apple tree in his garden, the unconcealed excitement in their voices as they said, ‘Isn’t it terrible what happened to poor Fraser?’ and the lust on their faces as they waited for their excitement to be mirrored.
Words by John McGahern.