Fluxblog Weekly #43: Björk, Straitjacket Fits, Steely Dan, 10,000 Maniacs, Helium
Another week of all old songs! I'm going to keep going a while longer because I have a bunch of songs I'd like to get to before going back into the flow of new music. If you have requests, please let me know.
Also: Over at BuzzFeed, I interviewed Animal Collective about their new album Painting With, and made a quiz in which you have to guess which rando band is on the cover of a back issue of NME.
February 22nd, 2016
Show Me Your Palms
Björk “5 Years”
I’ve only seen Björk perform once, at the Capitol Ballroom in Washington, D.C. in 1998 on the Homogenic tour. I still have some very clear memories of this show, and one of them surfaces every time I hear this song: When she got to the chorus and sang “you can’t handle love,” she would wave her hands, as if to say to the audience – “no no no, YOU can handle love, I’m singing about this other lame dude.” It has always struck me as a very charming and generous gesture.
“5 Years” is about feeling totally exasperated by someone’s fear of commitment, and pitying them for it. I like that as contemptuous as this song gets, it’s rooted in genuine concern for this man: “You’re the one who’s missing out / but you won’t notice til after 5 years / if you live that long! / you will wake up all loveless.” There are a lot of songs, particularly over the past decade and a half, that are brutal and petulant in how they address rejection, and a lot of the time I just think “Well, I can see why that didn’t work out.” But “5 Years” comes from a place of emotional maturity, and it’s less about telling someone how awful they are, and more about being completely disappointed by a person you actually love.
Björk’s performance on this track is so wonderfully expressive, especially as it goes along and she puts this guttural growl into emphasis words: “I’m so BORRRRRED with COWAAAARRRDS!!!” I love the way she refuses to blame herself for this guy’s fears and flaws, and how the song is just her impatiently waiting for someone to get on her level. Like most of the songs onHomogenic, the track juxtaposes lovely strings with deliberately ugly electronic noise that sounds jagged and violent, and this mirrors the feeling of lyrics and vocal perfectly – simultaneously gracefully serene and furious. By the end of the song, she’s demanding to know what’s so scary about love, and daring him to give it a shot. It’s so emotionally raw, but it’s also as self-possessed and self-respecting as a “baby, come back!” sentiment can get in a pop song.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 23rd, 2016
With Real Blood Inside
Straitjacket Fits “Brittle”
“Brittle” comes the perspective of someone knows they’re being selfish and petty and have decided to really lean into it, mostly because it’s emotionally honest but partly because they know it’s kinda funny to be so pathetic. A lot of Elvis Costello songs are written with this point of view, and Shayne Carter even kinda sounds like him here. It’s amazing how long it took me to realize that, actually – I’ve known this song well for over 20 years and that only hit me a few weeks ago.
Carter is singing to an ex, and making a dubious case for why they ought to get back together, or something like that. I’m not even sure if this guy even wants that, so much as he wants to make it clear that no one needs it more than him. That’s the exact word he uses – it. The love, the spark, the sex, the feeling of being wanted? Maybe all of it, who can say. He’s ambiguous in the details, but adamant about wanting it, and is off-handedly spiteful about his competition: “Just because another’s words can touch you better / don’t make ‘em measure up to mine.” I love that bit of ego there, because it’s what you do when you’re grasping for any reason to feel better than your rival. Evidence is unnecessary, you just need to believe that you’re better because, well, you’re biased.
The bridge is where the song reveals what’s really going on in this dude’s head, and wrings a bit of soulfulness of it: “Buried deep, there’s a hope that I remain so endless and boundless, you spin when you dream.” All he really wants is to matter to this other person, and he doesn’t care whether it’s good or bad. It’s just to leave a mark, because he doesn’t want to be alone in thinking this was a significant connection. It’s “an eye for an eye,” but for romantic jealousy. And of course this ends on a coy, passive-aggressive note: “Anyway, could be something you’d be best off to consider.”
Yeah, I love this song. And I hate that I see some version of myself in it.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 24th, 2016
Screen Out The Sorrow
Steely Dan “Black Cow”
Music is an abstract medium, but “Black Cow” sounds unmistakably like midtown Manhattan, or at least a somewhat romantic notion of it. There’s just something in the sway of it, the architecture of the chords, the way the tones evoke chrome, neon, and concrete. It insinuates classiness and grime in equal measures. It just matches.
The lyrics of “Black Cow” are firmly rooted in Manhattan, and are just as vivid as the sounds. Donald Fagen’s character in this song is a put-upon guy who’s trying to get out of a toxic relationship with some party girl with ambiguous addictions and a lot of other dudes on the side. Or so he says – Fagen’s men are unreliable narrators, and I think we should take it as a given that this dude is insecure and upset. The song is asking you to give him the benefit of the doubt, so let’s just roll with that.
Fagen’s lyrics draw a lot out of his characters with only a few careful details. The song starts out with the guy noticing her at Rudy’s, a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen that actually still exists. She’s high again, and he’s disappointed in her, but he quickly ends up back at her place, where his issues with her are right there on the counter – her little black book, and her “remedies.” I think he’s jealous, sure, but I think the main frustration comes out later in the song: “I’m the one who must make everything right / talk it out till daylight.” He’s exhausted by having to take care of her, and the benefits of that – the sex, really – isn’t the draw that it used to be.
In the chorus, he takes her to a diner and breaks up with her, admitting that he doesn’t care anymore why she’s doing any of this. He’s not angry, just tired and bored. I like that there’s so little contempt for the woman in this song – the worst you get is just weary condescension. I get the impression that even if he thinks she’s being weak or self-destructive, he respects her and kinda wishes he was like her. The whole song is like that shrug older people have to do around the youngish: “Yeah, that all sounds like fun, but I’ve got to be responsible and go to work.” He knows it’s time to call it off when the vicarious thrill of being around a hot young trainwreck is gone.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 25th, 2016
Blood And Love Tastes So Sweet
10,000 Maniacs “Candy Everybody Wants”
“Candy Everybody Wants” is an essentially condescending song, but when I was a teenager, I slightly misheard some key lyrics in a way that made it much more so. Each time Natalie Merchant sang “so their minds” I heard “southern minds,” so it turned into this song about how everyone in the south is a hateful rube, and being a New Yorker listening to a band of New Yorkers, I just rolled with that. Thankfully, I was wrong about that.
The song is, in fact, a cheerful parody of cynicism, in which Natalie Merchant sings about a culture that thrives on indulging vice. The main hook is a shrug: “Hey! Give ‘em what they want.” The quasi-Motown arrangement makes it all sound fun and breezy, like the song could literally just be about candy. To further hammer it home, “Candy Everybody Wants” is structured so that it’s basically three different chorus hooks in rotation, because people like hooks, and hey, give ‘em what they want, right?
It’s hard to imagine a song like this being a hit now, or anyone even a little bit like Natalie Merchant being a pop star in this era. Even in a period when the internet media is full of think pieces informed by social justice rhetoric, anyone as Pollyanna-ish, prim, and politically didactic as 10,000 Maniacs-era Merchant would have trouble catching on in the indie world, much less crossing over to the mainstream. (The intro to the video of this song actually includes the phrases “marginalized member of a spectator democracy” and “manufactured consent.”) But I think this song is very relevant right now, as this “hey, let’s shamelessly indulge the worst in people” has become the guiding principle of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy, and if we’re being honest, most of the internet economy. Merchant is asking the listener to consider who benefits from vice, and everyone being distracted from the incredibly boring important things in society. But asking is all she’s doing. Everything else is just giving you what you want.
Buy it from Amazon.
February 26th, 2016
My Head Goes Clear
Helium “What Institution Are You From?”
If you pressed me at any point in the past 20 years or so to name the sexiest songs I know, this Helium track is one of the first things that would come to mind. A lot of it is in the bass groove and the thick, strange atmosphere of the recording. Some of it is in Mary Timony’s voice, which switches between this disaffected “cool girl” tone and a breathy, angelic tone. And I’d be lying to you if I didn’t admit that a bit of it had to do with the weird mix of anxiety and desperation in it, and the implication that this song could be coming from someone in a literal mental institution. There’s something very damaged and sordid and intense about this song, and that bleakness is kinda sexy to me.
The way Timony says the title phrase sounds very glib, very “whatever.” It could just be mean-spirited flirtation, a cruel parody of pick-up line. I love the way the verses are kinda aimless and dead-eyed, but the emotions become more urgent when the chorus clicks in. She’s basically singing about having a crush on someone you don’t really like and makes you feel bad, but you feel powerless around them and that is calming in some way. She’s indecisive, and unsure about how much agency she has in anything. “Everything that I do makes me want you,” she sings. “Aren’t I supposed to?” It’s not surprising to me now that I connected with this song so much as a teenager – it’s such a great evocation of having no idea what to make of your attraction to other people, and just figuring that all sorts of shitty feelings are just how it’s meant to be.
Attempt to buy it from Amazon.