a failed explanation
08/09/2008

In my early teens I felt unquestioningly that romantic/sexual experience was a goal to be reached perhaps not at ANY cost – even then, I had some sense that it needed to be tied to some kind of meaning (maybe what seemed to be called love?) – but certainly, I understood, a 13 year old boy was supposed to be progressing inexorably from innocence to experience with the opposite sex. (The idea of same-sex intimacy was, for me, too remote even to be well-intentioned about, or horrified, or secretly interested. Yet.) There was no chance at that time that I would see this drive as irreconcilable with its essential competition—creation of a successful, usable identity for myself. I see now in retrospect how those raw, chaotic years were a stone by stone construction of walls, turrets, sculptures, doorways intended to signal to myself and others what/who I was. So many flaws went into the process that I found myself a few years later doing everything I could to dismantle those structures and rebuild them more soundly – again, not consciously, but no matter; it happened, thank god. Anyway, as that rickety, amateur façade goes up and up, we’re told at the same time that we’re supposed to let it down – on demand – for people with whom we want some sort of intimacy, or sexual experience, or whatever. There’s no way that I can see to reconcile these two drives, and that tension/frustration is wrapped up perfectly in the Futureheads’ recording of “Hounds of Love” – a flawless distillation of the contradictions at the heart of great art.

There are a lot of songs that seem somehow so personal, or inscrutable, that it would be impossible to cover them effectively, or meaningfully – but in the past couple years, I’ve found myself moved deeply by a few specific cover versions, without even really noticing at first that they were someone else’s songs. It’s as if these perfect songs need someone else to hold them up to the light, turn them around, inspect them, find the hidden seams of meaning, and dig into those seams. I wrote about this a while back with Gene Clark’s recording of “Tears of Rage,” which still causes my heart to do things I don’t totally understand – I sang his version of this song to my infant son nearly every night for about a year.

Anyway, I realize now that I’ve also spent the last couple years falling deeper in love with The Futureheads’ version of “Hounds of Love.” It’s funny enough how much I love the first Futureheads album (although maybe not surprising, if you knew my taste toward teeteringly reckless power-pop), and god knows I generally can’t deal with Kate Bush. Nothing against her, I just find listening to her voice like running into a brick wall I can’t get over, or around – I’m absolutely open to the possibility that someday I’ll find it easy to love her music and her singing, but it’s not happening for me right now. However, the combination of the band’s performance, the recording, and the construction/composition of the song itself is an awesome success.

The idea of vulnerability is inextricably wrapped up with energy in this recording, with a headlong, frantic naivete. The performance, while actually kept under a tight rein, still delivers the sense of a rush: loss of control, and the ambivalence of surrendering to pure sensation, fuck the consequences. It’s a tremendously powerful marriage of narrative sentiment with the speedy, heedless feeling that playing in a band gives you – the “oh shit, here we go, too late to change my mind, is this a good idea, fuck it, let’s go” moments of playing music with other people, on stage in front of an audience, tied implicitly but flawlessly to the same (or related) feelings of adolescence, of letting that carefully constructed new identity slip a little, or putting it into the hands of someone else. Meanwhile, the oblique but precise words switch from specific to metaphorical to pleading, to images that don’t seem to make sense, but feel like the narrator must feel – not knowing what you want, being frightened of intense emotion. (My instinct is that the band has to be young to pull this off, or at least to seem young – the song would be destroyed by any sense of experience. It could only have been included on a band’s debut album, or it would stink of bullshit.)

While the simple instrumentation and collective performance is where the recording gains its power and focus, the sound itself plays a crucial supporting role. The song begins tightly coiled and private, with dry voices and a single palm-muted guitar right down the center of the stereo image – then, twenty seconds in, as the first verse unfurls, it bursts open wide and dramatic, like Kate Bush would want, but just guitars and voices exploding outward twenty seconds in, after the first two line of the first verse. It doesn’t come across as trickery or studio manipulation – the expansion of the sound field actually builds an expressive, propulsive openness into the recording that mimics the narrative subject of the song.

So there’s the dissection, I guess – this piece of writing is like a live recording of my own attempts to decode where this song gets its power over me….and now I feel like I haven’t quite put my finger on it still. Should I learn a lesson here? Next entry in the old Cricket Club should probably be an angry harangue of some sort, rather than a reasoned attempt to figure out my deranged tastes. But shit, look at Kid’s blog over there – that guy likes Third Eye!

The disappearing self
12/03/2006

I’m currently dismantling myself; it’ll take awhile, since I don’t want to damage the surrounding environment too dramatically, and I do plan to rebuild. It’s just that sometimes you have to shake your shit down to the foundations and see what stays standing, right?

It’s been too long since I took my whole reality apart, so it felt like time to get rolling—final demolition probably won’t be completed till June or July, at which point rebuilding (or at least a planning phase) should be well underway. In the meantime, as I crowbar down the mildewed drywall in my head, I’m recording the sounds I uncover. It’s an interesting process, but really I won’t know what it sounds like for a while, I think. It definitely involves pianos, although I can’t be certain they’re real yet.

Independence Day
07/10/2006

It’s weird—I’ve always been a huge fan of the Band, and definitely of Dylan—and I’ve always really enjoyed the song “Tears of Rage”, without thinking too hard about it. One of the things I love about the Band is that the words and music flow together impressionistically to form a whole sound that functions (for me) essentially free from meaning, as a soundtrack for a moment, totally flexible and dependent on my own feelings and moods. Obviously, it’s traditional to consider Dylan’s lyrics high poetry, or sacred texts, or something, but a lot of his music and words works the same way on me—impressions and sensations dominate, rather than some symbolist agenda. Maybe I’m an idiot, I don’t know, that’s just how it hits me—and anyway, I prefer to be called a simpleton.

I’ve recently been getting deep into this Gene Clark album called White Light, or maybe it’s just called Gene Clark, it’s hard to tell; I’m in love with his voice, and with the laid-back arrangements on the record, and his version of “Tears of Rage” has been a constant soundtrack for me since New Year’s Day, when I first heard the record. I’d guess I’ve heard this recording maybe 70 or 80 times in the last six months, and I’ve been slowly getting sucked into the lyrics.

I’d always idly considered it a nice, achey song about being a parent, but I’m starting to apply the same symbolist/metaphorical structures to this song that I’ve always eschewed, and thinking during this July 4th season, and given my new life teaching history, and given my feelings about our country right now, that the song is incredibly powerful as a yearning for reconciliation with the idea of America. If you place the first-person plural narrative voice as the citizenry, and the object as America (or the ideal of America), it becomes a really beautiful song about bitterness, betrayal, reconciliation, and eventually resignation, in a whole new light. The central idea that we are the parents of this ungrateful, complicated, searching child nation is heartlessly true.

I guess the opening image, “we carried you in our arms on Independence Day,” with its implications of misguided/inappropriate/well-meaning care and love, might have clued me in earlier, or maybe I’m ridiculously off the mark in any case, but I love the thought, and the way the metaphor extends and develops throughout the song. And as much as I love the Band’s version, and the Basement Tapes bootlegs and everything, I have to say that Gene Clark’s version is my favorite; something in his voice, his offhandedness and slightly gruff wavering sting, is just right for the song, and the little guitar/drum turnarounds at the end of each chorus are like little gems of easiness.

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