The Lumineers’ debut album was released on April 3, 2012. The #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 that week was “We Are Young” by Fun. Before that it was “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” by Kelly Clarkson. Before that was “Part Of Me” by Katy Perry.
What all these songs have in common, along with most songs in Top 40 then and now, is HUGE production. Sure, there may be a piano or guitar at the beginning, and there may be an a capella or rap breakdown somewhere in there, but at least by the time the chorus kicks in, all of these songs are supported by layers and layers of synths, echo, and various digital production tricks to create a thick, dense waveform, a tsunami of sound that physically washes over the listener. This isn’t a bad thing — it can be very powerful, which is probably what makes it so very popular. And boy oh boy is it popular right now.
Compare this to the sound on The Lumineers, whose defining aural quality is open space. Almost every instrument is acoustic, and very few instruments even appear on a given track. Vocals are in the forefront, but they aren’t heavily processed, and they’re frequently accompanied by only one instrument, or none at all. Where the sound level does build, it tends to be from natural timbres — a chorus of voices, stomping feet, clapping hands.
This style gets called a few different things — alt-folk, indie folk, Americana. But it strikes me that in an age dominated by electronic instruments and high-gloss production, the impulse behind The Lumineers has an awful lot in common with punk rock. Like The Ramones and The Clash, The Lumineers reject the dominant form of their time and hearken back to the simpler sound of an earlier era.
But unlike punk, they’re going back a little further, and to a different section of the culture — one more rural, less industrialized. (Also, they’re not quite the pioneers that The Ramones were, rather following in the tracks left by Mumford & Sons, and in a slightly different sense Arcade Fire and The Decemberists. But hey, they’re local heroes, so I’m putting the assignment spotlight on them.) From the way they dress to the simple instrumentation and arrangements, The Lumineers’ image and sound is rooted in the folk music of at least a hundred years ago.
That’s not to say that that The Lumineers entirely reject the modern world — their lyrics mention fast food parking lots, taking a bus to Chinatown, having your car window smashed but the stereo left intact. And there’s even an electric guitar poking through here and there, albeit played slow and solo. Still, even where they aren’t telling explicitly period stories (“Flapper Girl”, “Charlie Boy”), The Lumineers are miles away from the dominant pop sensibility.
That’s the easy part, though. Anybody can look at the charts and declare, a la George Costanza, “I will do the opposite!” It takes something a little more special to have a Top 5 single and two Top 5 albums with “the opposite.” So what’s their appeal beyond punky independence? There are a lot of factors that go into it, but I’d like to focus on three. First, impassioned vocals. Wesley Schultz brings an enormous depth and nuance to his singing. He’s never screamy, never histrionic, but the spaciousness of the songs allows him to bring out the deepest feelings in his characters — the betrayal in “Morning Song”, the dedication in “Ho Hey”, the gratitude in “Dead Sea”.
Second, the musical cleverness. I found myself doing double-takes as I listened to this album, starting tracks over so I could understand how they’d taken me in. “Submarines”, for instance, starts out with a piano just a hair ahead of the beat — a rollicking, syncopated sound. But a few lines in, the piano pulls back behind the beat and changes time signatures from 4/4 to 3/4, altering the feel of the song completely. Then a guitar comes in, and the beat switches back to 4/4, but we hear drums playing triplets behind the next verse. The song keeps switching back and forth, playing the rhythms against each other, percussive chords playing in standard time while voices shout “sub-ma-rines!” triplets in the background. It becomes dizzying, hypnotic, enthralling.
Finally, the poignancy created by the combination of lyrics and music. “Charlie Boy” is a great example of this. The words tell a story of a boy born in 1944, inspired by Kennedy to serve in the military, and killed in the Vietnam War. We hear about his mother’s worry, and the town’s grief (“Meutchen mourn our loss.”) A little research reveals that Wesley Schultz’s uncle was named Charles, born in 1944, and killed in action in Vietnam. His hometown of Meutchen, New Jersey, built a memorial for its three residents killed in the war. This story is told over a a duet of simply strummed guitar and mandolin, accompanied by a mournful cello. It’s a different, deeper mood than “We are young, so let’s set the world on fire”, and rather than overwhelming us with sound, it overwhelms us with emotion.
Most of my memories come associated with a strong sense of place. So it is with the day I bought Surrealistic Pillow. It was my freshman year of college, fall 1988, attending NYU, and one of my pleasures was cruising a circuit of various record stores in the Village. Browsing at St. Mark’s Sounds, I found a used CD of this album along the right-hand wall, for about 6 bucks, and snatched it. I’d owned the band’s greatest hits in high school, and I’d always heard about this album. With “Somebody To Love” and “White Rabbit” on there, it’s gotta be pretty good, right?
Not quite. It’s amazing. That album set me on a Jefferson Airplane binge, or at least as much of one as my poor college self could afford. Jefferson Airplane Takes Off, Crown Of Creation, Volunteers… they’re all great, but none compare to Pillow. Some of the songs on this album are, for me, transcendently beautiful.
But how do you write about something like that? I don’t think I’m capable of capturing a purely aesthetic experience in words. Maybe language isn’t capable of it. I really believe that some of this music affects me right down to the molecular level, with a feeling of divine elevation that is way beyond language, or perhaps deep underneath it.
So instead, I’ll just talk about when it happens. It happens when I hear the harmonies in “My Best Friend”, notes and voices blending in ways that are both unexpected and perfect. It happens in “Today” when all the voices come in (around 1:50), like a stage chorus, lifting the lonesome motif into the heavens — “Today, everything you want, I swear, it all will come true.”
It happens during the instrumental intro of “Comin’ Back To Me,” a quiet flute floating like dust motes in sunlit guitar picking. And it happens like crazy all throughout the incredible “Embryonic Journey,” quite possibly my favorite rock instrumental ever, especially in the powerful strums, like the ones around 0:32. Joe Jackson talks about music as “a cure for gravity”, and that’s what this feels like to me — the spirit borne aloft.
Chills of a different kind come from the quiet snare at the beginning of “White Rabbit.” That’s not so much elevation, but a spooky tingle, knowing what’s to come. All this talk of aesthetic transport and I haven’t even mentioned Grace Slick yet. Her voice has an otherworldly quality in “White Rabbit”, perfect for the distorted perception and unreality of the lyrics. “Somebody To Love,” her other lead vocal, projects not so much eeriness but icy authority. For all the hippie trappings surrounding this album, this song hardly feels like a flower child anthem — when she says “You better find somebody to love,” it’s a command, not a gentle suggestion. Then again, with so many people her age being drafted into Vietnam, maybe Slick’s imperative to love, compared to the government’s imperative to kill, is as counterculture as it gets.
Alongside this beauty and mystery is a strong strain of rock and roll. “3/5 of a Mile in 10 Seconds”, “She Has Funny Cars”, and “Plastic Fantastic Lover” are all energizing, lively rock tunes that exude freedom, and “Somebody To Love” itself is hard-charging and uncompromising. Come to think of it, this is the very mix of qualities that I came to love in Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac — loveliness from Christine, spookiness from Stevie, and rock from Lindsey, with all of them mixing into each other on various songs. I didn’t realize it on that fall day in 1988, but by seeking out Surrealistic Pillow, I was digging deeper into the San Francisco roots of a sound I already loved.
The Indigo Girls feel like old friends to me now. Within weeks of their 1988 debut, I was listening to them, and I’ve gotten every album they’ve released since. I’ve chased down bootlegs, collected their pre-Epic recordings, and faithfully fetched songs from soundtracks, tribute albums, benefit albums, and live albums. I’ve seen them live more than 20 times. The first time I played my guitar for Laura, it was an Indigo Girls song. Friends sang “The Power Of Two” at our wedding. They’ve been the soundtrack for countless road trips, evenings with friends, and hundreds of ordinary days and nights, sweetened a bit by braided harmonies, thoughtful lyrics, deep emotion.
So now when they release something new, it’s like getting together with people I’ve known most of my life. Somehow we just pick up where we left off. Yeah, of course it’s one way. And yeah, I know all about the difference between a public presentation and the private reality. I know they share what they choose to share, and I know it’s not always about them — heck, some of the time they even distinctly write in character, like “Cold Beer And Remote Control” or “Sister”. They may be writing in character most of the time, albeit less distinctly. I understand that songs aren’t diary entries, that there’s always projection involved, that their lyrics are often quite oblique to begin with. I know I don’t know them, not really. I know all that, and I don’t care. I’m not talking about facts, I’m talking about feelings. And how it feels is like we’re catching up.
So what’s going on with Amy and Emily these days? Well, based on One Lost Day, here’s what:
Emily
At this point in her life, Emily is doing a lot of looking back, a lot of evaluating. It seems like no accident that the cover of the album depicts her gazing into a car’s side mirror. Sometimes that rear view takes the form of pleasant reminiscing, as in “Elizabeth”, in which she thinks back on a long-lost friend. Pushing against the grain of today’s commonplace Facebook-driven reunions, she explicitly rejects the notion of reconnection: “I don’t want to look you up, I’m pretty sure it’s just enough / That I remember you fondly.”
Sometimes the recollection feels more painful, more suffused with regret, as in “Alberta,” whose lyrics give the album its title. Where “Elizabeth” recalls joy and carries that into the present, “Alberta” is more fraught — “And as hard as I try I just can’t let it lie / I get the feeling you haven’t quite made it home.” Still, she makes it clear that she’s not wallowing: “Can’t call it sorry, can’t call it sad / Maybe just the same as how a song can take you back / More like that.”
That lyric sums up the tone of most Emily songs on One Lost Day. The songs take her back to a breakup in “Southern California Is Your Girlfriend,” but not with anger: “You just had your plans and they didn’t include me.” Similarly, in “Learned It On Me,” she’s solicited for the kind of reunion she’s avoiding in “Elizabeth.” An ex wants to thank her for how much she learned in the course of her relationship with Emily, because she got all the dysfunction out of her system and now is happy, happy, happy. Not that her ex’s happiness does Emily much good — “I guess I should be happy I’m the course that set you free / I just wish you hadn’t learned it on me.” Even then, she faces the memory with equanimity: “It’s just me and it’s just you / And it’s just the way it goes, and now that book is closed.”
Some memories reach further back, as in “Findlay, Ohio 1968”. Emily’s grandmother really did live in Findlay, and the song is about her memories, but some of the reflections she shares could be from any childhood anywhere in America. The distant outcast girl, the wanderer boy next door, vague impressions of other kids’ household nightmares, station wagon wheels slapping on the turnpike. The Ohio 1968 setting allows Emily to express that strange quality memories can have, the innocence of not knowing what’s coming next, in light of the fuller experience of long life — “In two years time, Ohio would be up in flames” as unarmed college students are mowed down by National Guard rifles at Kent State.
Emily’s songs bookend the album, and while “Elizabeth” is probably her happiest tune in this collection, she also finds a measure of peace in the closer, “Come A Long Way.” As in the others, she’s looking back, but this time it’s a reflection on how much she herself has grown: “All my schemes drowned at the seams / Have left me fine in my own skin.” She’s also come to terms with her religious faith, a faith she’s struggled with in the past, in songs like “Trouble” and “Philosophy of Loss.” “It’s got your name on it” is the recurring verse Amy sings behind Emily’s words, “My name, my shame, my home, everything I own,” and in the liner notes thank-yous Emily makes it clear: “God, it’s got your name on it.”
Amy
Amy seems pretty happy too, for the most part, though happiness with somebody like Amy is always complicated. She encapsulates that truth beautifully and powerfully in one of the album’s best songs, “Happy In The Sorrow Key.” Over a stirring rock and roll riff, she lays out a travelogue, to England, to Singapore, and to Kingdom Come as she imagines it, each one a spiritual experience of vastness, eternity, divinity. And each time she returns to the contradiction that defines her: “I’m happy in the sorrow key.” It’s a feeling I can relate to myself — somehow the aching, haunting quality of minor key music satisfies my soul in a way that regular do-re-mi can’t match. Amy wouldn’t be Amy without that sense of yearning — it’s what makes her who she is, and she’s happy as she is.
That doesn’t mean her neighbors are doing that well, though. Oh, no indeed. Amy lives in rural Georgia, and she’s been writing about her experiences there for over a decade now. For instance, in 2004’s “Tether”: “I kicked up the dirt, and I said to my neighbor / ‘We keep making it worse, we keep getting it wrong’ / He tucked in his shirt, he stood a little bit straighter / He said ‘We need a few less words dear, we need a few more guns.'” The theme has continued through a variety of songs, such as “Dirt And Dead Ends”, “Three County Highway”, and the excellent “Rural Faggot” from her 2005 solo album Prom. One Lost Day has a couple more entries in the country tragedy list. “Spread The Pain Around” shows a deeply dysfunctional relationship, the man trapped in his stoicism and alcoholism as the woman struggles to escape but can never quite bring herself to leave. Meanwhile, “Fishtails” tenderly observes a Georgia kid with shreds of innocence trailing, as friends and family lock into familiar grooves of drinking, domestic violence, and desperation.
Speaking of songs that call back to Amy’s solo work, “Olympia Inn” feels like the sequel to “Bus Bus,” from 2008’s Didn’t It Feel Kinder. In “Bus Bus” she’s on that tour bus, feeling lonely, hoping her partner will call, hoping nobody dies while she’s out there. She wonders if she’s pushing her luck, but she’s still hoping to keep the connection. In “Olympia Inn,” things have taken a turn for the worse. She’s on the bus still, or again, but no longer looking forward to that phone call: “She’s gonna call me when she’s down, just to knock me around.” Her stronger connection now is to her driver Johnny, as she pours out her sorrows to him, adding her tears to the pouring rain. She has no regrets about the life she’s chosen — “Oh Johnny, I’ve sung with pleasure / It’s a good life, there is no measure” — but she knows the price she’s paid too, and hopes for a little comfort when it hurts the most. “Hey Johnny, in the morning / When you wake me, call me ‘darling'”.
She also finds solace in activism, and this time around her cause is racial strife, as spelled out in “The Rise Of The Black Messiah.” Sometimes I find Amy’s political songs a bit tiring, kind of like a friend railing on about some justice campaign I don’t feel too attached to. Sure, I support the project, but it can be a bit laborious to hear about repeatedly. This time, though, I’d just finished reading a bunch of slave narratives and postbellum Southern history, as research for my most recent Watchmen article, so I felt a little closer to the subject matter. Even so, I tend to prefer her more personal stuff. She’s passionate, she’s articulate, and I love how much she cares, but I care more about her life than her causes.
“Texas Was Clean” gives me some of that life. Of all Amy’s songs on this album, it’s the one closest to the general nostalgic tone of Emily’s batch of tunes. She takes us to a corner of her heart where she holds a special place for Texas, remembering in pristine reflections how it appeared to her as a child — “as far from the South without getting out.” At first it’s just stray images: “boots on the floor of a barn”, “the gridded green” of a football field, the flickering vision of a horse on her bedpost at night. Then, as life proceeds and expands, she shares another Texas memory from later on — “In the Austin night under vapor lights / You laughed at me then you took me in.” The song itself feels pristine — pure harmonies atop quiet bells and acoustic guitar.
For One Lost Day as a whole, Amy’s songs this time felt just a little bit stronger than Emily’s, but they’re both working at an extremely high level, as they have been for years. It’s another strong album, and another bunch of strong songs, but even better for me, it’s another visit from my old friends Amy and Emily. Always great to hear from them.
Ramones is one of those epochal albums, an album that is said to have Changed Everything. It’s the original pure punk rock record, the one that crystallized a sound which would soon fuel recordings by The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and a host of others. Broad generalizations about a scene as complex and multifaceted as rock and roll are always bound to fail, but here goes anyway. When Ramones came out in April 1976, rock was doing its damnedest to become legitimate — singer-songwriters like Jackson Browne and James Taylor, theatrical spectacles like Kiss and Alice Cooper, high-fashion glam like David Bowie and Roxy Music, classically intricate prog like King Crimson and Yes, and veterans of 1960s bands working harder and harder to prove their continued relevance. Into the midst of all this grown-up strutting, here come The Ramones with an album that is brazenly, unapologetically, and absurdly adolescent.
Or at least, that’s what I hear when I listen to it today. With all the weight of history it’s accumulated, I find it a little challenging to write about Ramones naively, but the truth is although I knew a lot about it, I never really spent much time listening to it. So when Robby assigned it to me and I put it on repeat, what I kept hearing was, basically, a bunch of smart-aleck kids, but kids who have a fierce and precise dedication to the beat, so much so that everything they do is made to serve that beat.
They cranked out one song after another, most of which hew to basically the same formula: brevity, breakneck speed, repetition around a few notes and chords, willfully dumb lyrics, and above all, a rhythm section that puts a breathtaking rush of energy into every measure. Part of what makes these songs work is the contrast. While the lyrics communicate ennui, or degeneration, or cruelty, or frustrated romance, the music over and over again communicates abandon — joy, recklessness, freedom.
That’s adolescence all over, isn’t it? The songs themselves are like a mental map of a 14-year-old boy in Queens. There’s a fascination with taboo subjects like Nazism (“Blitzkrieg Bop”, “Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World”), prostitution (“53rd and 3rd”), and horror movies (“Chain Saw”, “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”). You’ve got your kid drugs (“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”), your kid crime (“Judy Is a Punk”), and your kid violence (“Beat On The Brat”, “Loudmouth”). There’s even a CIA-spy fantasy (“Havana Affair”). When it comes to sex, though, the whole thing is quite innocent. Aside from their musical attack, “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Listen To My Heart” could have come from 1962. Heck, “Let’s Dance” did come from 1962, and “Judy Is A Punk”‘s “Second verse, same as the first” is a callback straight to Herman’s Hermits’ “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.”
Maybe it’s a fascination with the British Invasion that explains The Ramones’ phony British-ish accents? For as much as it often sounds like English singers lose their accents when they sing, The Ramones seem to be trying their hardest to come across as English. Listen to the way they sing words like “verse”, “first”, “brat”, or “girl”. Or for that matter, “Hey! Ho!”, which in their hands somehow becomes “‘Ey! ‘Oh!” My favorite manifestation is in “Havana Affair”, in which “banana” sounds like it came from London, and suddenly “Havana” is pure Noo Yawk. On paper the words rhyme, but in the tune they sound completely different from each other.
If they just had their lyrics, The Ramones would be nowhere. With just the tunes and the way they’re sung, they would have a weird charm. But once you get Dee Dee on bass and Tommy on drums, driving every song like a floored Barracuda, and guitars spitting pure hormonal ecstasy and madness into the increasingly pretentious rock establishment, you get a record that changes history. Hey! Ho! Let’s go!
Before you read any further, please heed this warning: Watchmen spoilers ahead!
As I mentioned in my notes on method, I had originally decided to leave out any works I’d seen/read/heard/whatever before, but as the project has expanded, I’ve decided to throw those back in. At the time, I believed that meant that to finish with Chapter One, I’d need to write a post on Dylan and another on Taxi Driver.
However, in rereading the v2.0 Watchmen annotations for that chapter, I realized I’d missed something. Though it’s flying well under the radar, there is in fact a cultural reference in this panel, or at least the beginnings of one:
The annotations tell us that this panel is in fact:
The first appearance of “Sweet Chariot” sugar cubes. (I don’t know if these are a Veidt product; the “Chariot” reference is his style, but the name refers to a Gospel song, which isn’t.)
Now, it isn’t at all evident from the panel itself that the sugar cubes have any particular brand name. All we see is a can labeled “Sugar”, and cubes individually wrapped with an “S” stamped on them. The cubes reappear, again anonymously, in Chapter 3, when Dreiberg seeks to sweeten Laurie’s coffee. (“Hell, I thought I had more sugar than that.”) It isn’t until Chapter 6 that we learn the brand name, from their description in Rorschach’s arrest paperwork, which includes among his possessions “5 individually wrapped cubes ‘Sweet Chariot’ chewing sugar.”
Nevertheless, the annotations are quite right that this is their first appearance, so let’s deal with them here. I don’t think there’s evidence in the text either way for whether those sugar cubes are a Veidt product, and I don’t think it much matters. The reference, however, to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, matters a lot, on a few different levels.
First, even before touching the referent, I would argue that the cubes and their name operate as a symbol for the relationship between Dreiberg and Rorschach. Dan carries Rorschach in several ways, the first of which is evident on this very page of Chapter 1. Rorschach is destitute, and seems to live mostly off scraps provided by others, through their generosity, fear, or ignorance. Today he takes his meal from Dreiberg’s beans and sugar, a metaphorical ride which is literally sweet.
Dan also provides resources to Rorschach. They were initially partners, back in the pre-Keene days, but even now Rorschach benefits from the products of Dreiberg’s genius, such as the grappling hook gun he uses when we first see him in Chapter 1, and again when trying to evade capture in Chapter 5. Even closer to a literal sweet chariot is Dan’s owlship Archie, which swings low to rescue Rorschach from prison, and later carries him all the way to what will be his final resting place.
There’s a sweetness to that relationship, seen most clearly in the awkward handshake between them in Chapter 10. A sugar cube makes a fine symbol for their friendship, rigid but soluble. For Detective Fine, the sugar cubes crystallize the connection between Dreiberg and Rorschach — he knows that Rorschach had those sugar cubes on him at his arrest, and comments when he visits Dreiberg, “Hey, ‘Sweet Chariot’ sugar cubes! Only come in catering packs, right?”
Just as the words “sweet chariot” reflect on Rorschach’s relationship with Nite Owl, so does the song itself reflect on his story. It’s a song, first and foremost, about death.
When I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
Comin’ for to carry me home
A band of angels comin’ after me
Comin’ for to carry me home
According to scholar Christa K. Dixon, “in the spirituals ‘Jordan’ refers mostly to the dividing line between wilderness-like earthly life and promised heavenly life.”1 A great many spirituals call upon some notion of transformation — that’s why so many of them center on the Book of Revelation — and in many of them, death is that transformation, a deliverance from the misery of slave life, and the promise of a heavenly reward. In “Swing Low,” that band of angels comes to retrieve the departed, to take him across the Jordan from this world into the next. The repeated refrain, “comin’ for to carry me home”, emphasizes the fact that the slave’s true home is not on Earth, but in heaven.
Rorschach also feels out of place in this world — for him it’s rudderless, morally blank. The only sane responses to it, as he sees it, are his own, and the Comedian’s. Something else binds those two characters together as well — though there’s an awful lot of death in Watchmen, only two of the main characters die: Rorschach and The Comedian. And since The Comedian’s death occurs before the story begins, only Rorschach can be said to die in the course of the plot. So naturally it’s with Rorschach that the Sweet Chariot cubes are associated — they foreshadow his death, and as he rides to meet it in Antarctica, he drops his final wrapper, which looms up huge in the camera’s eye.
However, while “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is most clearly about death, it has another layer of meaning. Historical evidence suggests that, among other songs, it was sometimes sung as a part of a slave code, signaling that an opportunity for escape was coming. In this context, “home” isn’t heaven but the free states of the North, and the angels aren’t supernatural guardians, but rather Underground Railroad “conductors” like Harriet Tubman. In fact, when Tubman died, the local newspaper reported that “she led those at her bedside in singing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ with her final breath.”2
Escape and rescue are recurring themes in superhero fiction, and Watchmen interrogates them, just as it does most other superhero tropes. With the Sweet Chariot sugar cubes, though, that interrogation begins only gradually. Rorschach first shakes them out of their container as he pursues what appears to be a traditional heroic trajectory: saving those in danger, in this case by warning them that the danger is coming. They appear again when Dan is taking care of Laurie, or trying to. This is a slightly more problematic idea of rescue, as he’s clearly attracted to her, and therefore has a bit of an ulterior motive. Also, she arguably she doesn’t need saving, having made her own sort of escape from a life she had begun to see as servitude. Nevertheless, Dan’s approach at this point mostly conforms to a typical heroic code of conduct, with him as the rescuer and Laurie as the damsel in distress, albeit in a considerably less dramatic idiom than superheroes normally occupy.
However, we learn that the sugar cubes are in fact called “Sweet Chariot” through an inversion of superheroic rescue — they’re listed in Rorshach’s arrest report, as part of the inventory of taken of his pockets when he was captured. Now he is the prisoner rather than the rescuer, and has to wait for Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II to be his conductors from bondage. In fact, the sugar cubes appear again in chapter 7, as Dan is sweetening Laurie’s coffee (this time successfully), just before they listen to news reports about Rorschach and Dan frets about how Rorshach will fare in jail.3 Then, when Fine visits in the next chapter, the sugar cubes provide evidence of Dan’s connection with Rorschach, and spurs the rescue effort: “Springing Rorschach any later than tomorrow isn’t safe.”
The final appearance of “Sweet Chariot” sugar cubes in chapter 11, that wrapper blowing in the Antarctic wind, brings together the ideas of death and rescue. Rorschach is (somewhat unknowingly) heading towards his own death, but the mission that brings him there with Nite Owl is a heroic one: stopping Veidt’s destructive actions. Watchmen won’t let us have this rescue. Not only has the destruction happened well before the pair can intervene, but Veidt believes that the death is the rescue. In his “we had to destroy the village in order to save it” mentality, Veidt horribly brings together the two meanings of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, sending death raining down and believing that he’s ushering in “an age of illumination” by doing so.
There’s one final aspect of this allusion to consider, and it’s a big one. By invoking a song directly connected with American slavery, Moore’s use of “Sweet Chariot” invites us to consider race, specifically the past and present of African-Americans. What can we say about African-Americans in Watchmen?
A number of incidental characters are Black — the postal carrier who picks up Rorschach’s journal, the watch seller up the street from the newsstand, some victims of the tenement fire rescue by Nite Owl and Silk Spectre II, some patrons at Happy Harry’s, the prisoner Rorschach burns with cooking fat, the maid at Sally Jupiter’s retirement community. There are also three named African-American characters in the book: Bernie the younger (who reads the pirate comics), Malcolm Long (Rorschach’s psychiatrist), and Gloria Long, Malcolm’s wife.
This collection of characters neither adheres to stereotypes nor studiously avoids them. Bernie hangs out on the corner all day while his mom works, and speaks in street slang — “suit y’self, jive-ass”, or “shee-it.” Malcolm and Gloria, on the other hand, are consummate white-collar professionals, with educated diction and middle-class dinner parties in their bourgeois apartment. Likewise, the unnamed characters run a gamut, from criminals up to ordinary workers. There’s nothing in particular binding them together outside of race. Gloria underscores this point with her indignant response to Bernie the elder’s suggestion that maybe the watch seller knows Malcolm: “What? You think we’re all in some Negro club; that we all know each other?”
By making sure his African-American characters are neither demonized nor sanctified, Moore makes a point about race, albeit not a particularly deep one. A little more subversive is his suggestion that superheroes might serve a racist agenda. When Captain Metropolis tries to organize the Crimebusters, his display includes his labels for the types of “crime” to be fought: promiscuity, drugs, anti-war demonstrations, and… “Black unrest.” Given that this meeting took place in 1966, and given the placement of the tag over Southern states, this “unrest” was almost certainly the Civil Rights Movement. Gardner is obviously a conservative, but it’s a little startling to think that he would want to employ operatives like Dr. Manhattan or The Comedian against peace protests and civil rights marches.
The New Frontiersman lives much further out on the right wing, and is even more shocking, in its favorable comparison between superheroes and the KKK:
Nova Express makes many sneering references to costumed heroes as direct descendents of the Ku Klux Klan, but might I point out that despite what some might view as their later excesses, the Klan originally came into being because decent people had perfectly reasonable fears for the safety of their persons and belongings when forced into proximity with people from a culture far less morally advanced.
It’s already stunning to read an argument defending the KKK, but the comparison between that group and superheroes is chilling indeed. And yet, we’re forced to admit that the comparison isn’t entirely off-base. Klan members dress themselves in distinctive costumes and ride into the night to defend their status quo. I’ve written before about how superheroes also defend the status quo, fighting against the forces of change.
In a typical superhero comic, those forces of change are obviously negative, but Watchmen challenges the genre fan’s assumption that this would always be so. Sometimes even the most progressive change is disruptive, and sometimes it deeply frightens people attached to the old order. When those people put on masks and terrorize the change agents, we find their actions despicable. Yet what is so different about superheroes themselves, besides the nature of the status quo they defend? And if they were defending a repugnant philosophy, by use of violence, wouldn’t we want a law preventing that?
There’s one more overt reference to race in Watchmen. It comes towards the end of Chapter 6, after Long’s last session with Rorschach, the one in which Rorschach tells the story of Gerald Grice and his dogs. In the journal entry that follows, Long’s diction has acquired the clipped patterns of Rorschach:
Walked home along 40th street. A black man tried to sell me a Rolex watch. When I kept walking he started shouting “Nigger! Hey nigger!” Ignored him. Bought paper.
This narration happens at the top left panel of a page. The previous panel was Long, palm to face, overwhelmed by the darkness of Rorschach’s experiences. Rorschach has told him that existence has “no meaning, save what we choose to impose,” and that it is only humans who create the brutality and evil of this world. Immediately afterward, the world seems determined to prove Rorschach right. On the next page, Long stares at an ink blot, and realizes: “In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.” And the final panel before the quote is just that: pure blackness.
Let me suggest that this ending has a metaphysical level, yes, but on another level it is also about, well, Blackness. In the end, skin color, nose shape, hair curliness, and the rest have no meaning, save what we choose to impose. To understand the meanings we have chosen around race is to understand the horror of our history. The captivity and slavery that made people long for death, the bloody war we fought to vanquish it, the hooded men searing the night with beatings, burnings, and lynchings… it’s us. Only us.
3 There’s something a bit odd about this scene. On page 11, panel 2, we see the full bag of sugar cubes, and can read part of the “Sweet Chariot” label. On the next page, Dan asks Laurie, “Did I put enough sugar in the coffee? I went out to the store specially…” The issue had already made the point he was at the store — he cites that as the reason Laurie was able to activate the flamethrower: “I was down here checking out the systems earlier. I left everything switched on when I went out to the store.” So we know he was at the store, and that his main purpose was to get sugar.
But if “Sweet Chariot” sugar cubes only come in catering packs, how did Dan pop over to the store to buy some? In the scene with Detective Fine in the next chapter, the fact that those cubes aren’t available at the store is why Fine cites them — if they only come in catering packs, Rorschach couldn’t have bought them, and therefore was much more likely to have been supplied by Dreiberg. This strikes me as an idea Moore had when writing chapter 8, and liked enough that he decided to overlook the contradictory evidence in chapter 7. [Back to post]
There’s a lot that I love about Aimee Mann’s music, but if I had to pick just one thing, it would be her witty, sophisticated, devastating lyrics. The woman really knows her way around a metaphor, and that skill is in evidence all over Bachelor No. 2.
Take, for example, “Red Vines”, one of the album’s real masterpieces. The song is about knowing and loving someone who is fun, charming, and destructive, both to himself and to others. (The song doesn’t specify the gender of its subject, but for simplicity let’s pretend it’s a man. Something about it feels male to me.) Here’s the opening quatrain:
They’re all still on their honeymoon
Just read the dialogue balloon
Everyone loves you
Why should they not?
Already we’ve got two metaphors in play. First, the honeymoon — the fun, wild, carefree part of a relationship, an exhilarating time before the real work sets in. But the narrator isn’t part of that honeymoon — she’s observing it, as the song’s subject entertains and charms a group of people. From the first line, Mann establishes narrative distance, and a sense of fun with doom embedded within.
Then there’s the comics metaphor: “read the dialogue balloon”. Again, there’s a distance within that description — seeing the subject as not just a character in a story, but someone trapped within panels, and transparent to the reader in a way he isn’t to the other characters. That dialogue balloon is a way of making interaction manifest as an object, and when we are able to see someone’s words that way, it lessens the power of the spell they might have otherwise cast.
So far we’ve got a rhyme scheme of AABC. Now here comes the second verse to resolve that:
And I’m the only one who knows
That Disneyland’s about to close
I don’t suppose you’d
Give it a shot?
Knowing all that you’ve got
Are cigarettes and Red Vines
Before we touch the metaphor, can we bow down for a second to those brilliant rhymes? The first two lines introduce a new rhyme (DD), which is then repeated as an internal rhyme in the third line with “suppose”, before resolving the rhymes from the first stanza (BC), then another hit on C (“got”, to rhyme with “not” and “shot”) to sweep into the chorus. That is great stuff. Not only that, the Disneyland metaphor wonderfully recapitulates and clarifies the image of the honeymoon — everything’s fun and thrilling right now, and everybody thinks it’s going to stay that way except for the narrator, who knows much better because she’s seen it before. Disneyland closes every day. Honeymoons always end.
Finally, there’s the title image of the song, and the linchpin of the chorus: cigarettes and Red Vines. Both of those things provide a rush, which later fades into a nasty, sick feeling. With repetition, they can do a whole lot of damage to you, but they can also be really hard to leave behind. Everybody who’s had a relationship like this, raise your hand. Yep, me too.
That song isn’t the only one on the album that perfectly encapsulates a rather hopeless relationship. In fact, to one extent or another most of them do that, some more metaphorically than others. Probably the other one in “Red Vines”‘ league metaphorically is “Driving Sideways”, an image that nails the sense of false motion that can imbue doomed relationships. The notion of driving sideways pulls a few concepts together, each relevant to broken love affairs: wrongness, danger, momentum, obliviousness. In fact, more than obliviousness:
And you will say
That you’re making headway
And put it in overdrive
But you’re mistaking speed
For getting what you need
And never even noticing
You never do arrive
Having established with the title metaphor that the relationship in question is headed in the wrong direction, Mann raises the stakes by showing that the person driving it not only doesn’t understand the trouble, but is in fact accelerating it and mistaking that acceleration for progress.
Sometimes the metaphors build on each other, as in “Susan”, whose first stanza ends with a fuse, its second with a grenade, and its third with a roman candle, leaving a vapor trail in the sky. Or “Calling It Quits”, which starts with Monopoly money, then moves to “paid in chips / From a diamond as big as the Ritz”. “Paid in chips” evokes poker chips, but the next line flips that image with a Fitzgerald reference and the idea that the narrator’s compensation is no longer fake currency, but rather castoffs from someone with a mind-boggling level of wealth and privilege.
All of it serves the Mann signature tone, which is hard to sum up in a word, but the phrase for it might be “Well, this all seems horrible.” It’s distanced, but still angry. It’s depressed, but cracking jokes. It’s on its way out the door — she’s packing in “How Am I Different?”, bailing this town in “Ghost World”, calling it quits in… well, you know. Now that she’s met you, she wonders if you’d object to never seeing each other again.
Nobody captures this feeling like Aimee Mann, especially on this album. She knows exactly how it feels to be on the sidelines, hands tied, watching the show, and she knows just how to bring us back to when we were there too.
If testosterone had a sound, that sound would be AC/DC. That’s what I realized after listening to Back In Black on repeat. Testosterone is about a few different things:
Power
Domination
Fucking
Competition
Display
It is a powerful, mood-altering substance, and under its influence, every one of those things is really, really fun. It does not give a shit about anybody’s feelings, and will not hesitate to crush its opposition and revel in doing so. I’m not a hardcore user, but as a male I’m still on a pretty steady drip, and what that means is that these songs sweep me up every single time. When that hormone is flowing, moments like Brian Johnson screaming “Don’t try to push your luck just GET OUTTA MY WAY” are just awesome. I’m plugged into the power, vicarious domination, and it feels good.
That’s the magic of AC/DC — between the pounding, bone-deep rhythm section of Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams, and the twin guitar onslaught of Angus & Malcolm Young, there is an enormous amount of force in their music, and Brian Johnson’s voice crackles along the top. They chose their name well, because this band’s sound is electric. Without testosterone, it could be scary. With testosterone, it is thrilling.
It’s directly akin to the thrill I get from an action movie, or from watching a football game. There’s a damn good reason AC/DC was the sole artist chosen for the Iron Man 2 soundtrack, and why the song “Back In Black” opens the first Iron Man movie. The sound defines the character perfectly: the epitome of swagger, speed, sleekness, and strength, always ready to unleash fire and explosions. He’s testosterone on legs (and jets), and “Shoot To Thrill” is his middle name. Similarly, when Von Miller destroys Tom Brady (or Cam Newton, or Alex Smith, or anybody), the resulting crunch is a satisfying echo of “Hell’s Bells.”
When I witness those moments, my superego has left the building, and the id is bellowing “YEAH!!!” This all crystallized for me as I walked out of the Deadpool movie (which I loved), got into my car, and cranked up AC/DC like I’d been doing for days. It’s id, baby. Testosterone rush.
Now, when that rush fades and I shine a colder, more rational light on these things, they’re hard to defend. When people ask me why the endless explosions, punching, and mayhem of superhero movies are fun for me, the rational mind doesn’t have an answer. When Dante points out to me that those people on the football field are getting badly hurt, and I know that many of them live with constant pain and/or brain damage for the rest of their lives, I can’t tell him he’s wrong.
And god knows I can’t line up behind lyrics like “Don’t you struggle / don’t you fight / don’t you worry cause it’s your turn tonight” from “Let Me Put My Love Into You.” I’m a feminist, and the feminist in me is not cool with thinking of sex as “giving the dog a bone.” I recoil at “You bitch, you must be gettin’ old”, and can only giggle or eyeroll at the goofy Satanist imagery, or strident insistence that “rock and roll ain’t noise pollution.” I get that AC/DC has a sense of humor (“Big Balls”, anyone?) and that lets them off the hook partway, but I also couldn’t argue with anybody who is repelled by them on a lyrical basis.
But shit, those muted strums erupting into the power chords of “Back In Black”! The rhythm! The riff! The drums! The vocals! I am never not going to love that feeling, and my testosterone-fueled id has notified me that I’d better get comfortable with a little hypocrisy about it. Every single song on this album, including all of those I just mentioned, gets my foot pounding and my head banging. I can’t help the pleasure — it’s part of my nature.
And you know, as expressions of male aggression go, hard rock music is pretty damn safe. Rocking out in my car is nonviolent, harmless, and maybe even a little bit theraputic after a frustrating day. So shake a leg and have a drink on me, ’cause I got the power any hour to show the man in me.
Of all the rock stars who were popular when I was 8 years old, none was more confusing and frightening to me than Meat Loaf. Sure, there was Kiss, but between their Marvel comic and that movie where they all had superpowers, they fit comfortably into the superhero mold for me. Alice Cooper hosted The Muppet Show, so he had to be safe. And yeah, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols were all out there, but they weren’t even on my kid radar.
But here was this giant, messy, sweaty guy on TV, seemingly screaming into the mic. His album had a bad word right in its title! The cover showed a big black half-demon-ridden motorcycle rocketing up out of a spooky graveyard, with an enormous screaming bat in the background. And he was named MEAT LOAF. (Hence, both frightening and confusing.) Surely this had to be the epitome of that freaky heavy metal I’d heard about.
By the time I got to high school, I was more ready for him, but Denver radio seemed to have no interest, so it wasn’t until my freshman year of college at NYU that I finally clued in. Meat Loaf was all over New York radio, despite having peaked 10 years prior. Once I heard “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” a few times, especially now that I’d had some dashboard light experience of my own, it all started to make sense. So I bought Bat Out Of Hell at last, and from the first few seconds, it floored me.
The first song is the title track, and it opens with some power chords, and then a fierce, bravura piano part from Roy Bittan, The Professor of E Street Band fame. (E Streeter Max Weinberg also plays on the album.) The band kicks in with frenzied abandon, revving and revving to a classical climax, which then swings around in the Baba O’Riley rhythm, crashing down with thunderous piano chords and guitar screams to lock into a solid groove, over which an electric guitar solo will soar, finally resolving into the main melody line. That’s all in the first ninety seconds. It’s an overture to the grand epic which begins at 1:55, when Meat Loaf starts singing, and then goes on for another eight minutes.
This is Jim Steinman songwriting. You can’t talk about Meat Loaf without talking about Jim Steinman, and he made sure of that by placing “SONGS BY JIM STEINMAN” prominently under the album’s title on the cover. I recently read a critic’s quote about Steinman to the effect that he’s in a class by himself, simply because nobody else wants to write the kind of songs he writes. To smother them with adjectives, they are, by turns: majestic, theatrical, ridiculous, emotional, surprising, bizarre, affecting, hilarious, strange, histrionic, heartfelt, sly, and beautiful. He loves grand sweeping gestures, silly wordplay, classical movements, tempo changes, dramatic dialogue, sound effects, and melodic/lyrical callbacks. If they should all occur within the same song, so much the better.
They certainly all do in “Paradise By The Dashboard Light,” surely one of the longest, goofiest, and show-tuniest of all rock classics. Now listen, I love authenticity and soul-baring in rock music just as much as anybody. But for me there is something extremely appealing in this exaggerated fantasy-comedy scenario, elevated by its music to mock-operatic proportions. There’s so much pleasure and surprise in its every twist and turn.
We start with a 50’s rock and roll swagger, only missing the doo-wops in the background, then leap into Broadway production number grandiosity. But wait, here comes a whole second singer (Ellen Foley), another nod to musical theater as two characters stake their space in the song, sliding into a duet. Oh, and now we get the doo-wops, or rather the “ooh, shop shops”. The chorus recurs with more voices behind it, and falsetto parts amid the Broadway sparklers. New lyrics lead into another “doubly blessed”, which suddenly gets blindsided by a speeding truck of double-time teenage lust, switching quickly into makeout sound-effects and… Phil Rizzuto?!?
All at once we’ve got a hilarious baseball/sex metaphor going on, which both builds tension in the song and comically undercuts it, but just as you think the song and the teens are about to climax: STOP RIGHT THERE! True to its adolescent theme, some realms can’t be visited without a serious commitment, and this song commits to its character interactions while, again, throwing in the punchlines. Will you love me forever? Let me sleep on it! The back-and-forth of these two is just flat-out funny, especially the increasingly pleading tone in Meat Loaf’s voice as he keeps trying for a free pass. And then another turn, resolution of the sexual theme into the song’s final punchline — he swears to love her til the end of time… “so now I’m praying for the end of time / to hurry up and arrive / ‘Cause if I’ve gotta spend another minute with you / I don’t think that I can really survive.” Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you. It’s a masterful comic resolution, but the song has one more trick up its sleeve.
Over the outro, Foley lyrically reprises the beginning of the song — “It never felt so good / It never felt so right / And we were glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife,” restoring a sweetness to the memory and dissipating the bitterness and frustration of just a few moments prior. Meat Loaf’s part adds even more poignancy to the nostalgia: “It was long ago and it was far away / And it was so much better than it is today.” These parts give a thematic heft to everything that preceded them, making this a truly touching story rather than just a silly throwaway.
See, that’s part of the Steinman secret. Sure, it’s theatrical, it’s over-the-top, it’s downright preposterous. But if you look closely enough you’ll also find that it is deeply felt, even amid all the absurdity. That’s why Meat Loaf is such a perfect singer for these songs. He is one hundred percent willing to go way over the top, but he also sings with such commitment that he absolutely sells the genuine emotion that lives in these overwrought boxes. Check out some of the quieter songs, like “For Crying Out Loud” or especially “Heaven Can Wait.”
That song might as well be straight out of a musical (and indeed, was originally written for a Steinman musical, which apparently was going to be a… well, a science fiction version of Peter Pan.) It’s nothing like your typical rock song, but it also steers clear of the gaudier edges of Steinman’s oeuvre, and with Meat Loaf singing it becomes a genuinely lovely ballad. But whether it’s tender moments like this or headlong thrill rides like “All Revved Up With No Place To Go”, what binds this whole album together is that it is just. Pure. FUN.
And that’s a pretty damn great thing to be able to say about a rock and roll record.
Bruce Springsteen tells a story about the making of The Rising. He told it to Mark Binelli in a 2002 Rolling Stone article:
Springsteen still remembers the moment he realized that he needed to make this album. It was a few days after September 11th, and he was leaving the beach. A man drove by, rolled his window down and yelled, “We need ya!” Then he rolled his window up and kept going. “And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve probably been a part of this guy’s life for a while,’ ” Springsteen says. “And people wanna see other people they know, they wanna be around things they’re familiar with. So he may need to see me right about now. That made me sense, like, ‘Oh, I have a job to do.’ Our band, hopefully, we were built to be there when the chips are down. That was part of the idea of the band, to provide support. The most fundamental thing I hear from fans, constantly, is, ‘Man, you got me through’ — whatever it might be. ‘My divorce. My graduation. My high school. This part of my life, that part.'”
Bruce made it his job to be there for us after 9/11, to provide support when we needed it, and damn, does he ever come through on this album. I got The Rising when it came out, and always enjoyed it, but I never really listened closely to it until Robby assigned it to me this week. (Well, this fortnight — in case it’s not obvious, we’ve shifted this game to a biweekly basis.)
Listening closely to this record is a revelation. These songs aren’t just songs. They’re medicine. They’re a balm, not just for a nation or its people suffering after an attack, but for anybody who has ever suffered a deep, fundamental loss. Because what becomes abundantly clear after listening to this album is that it is all about loss. That loss might be national, it might be personal — it really doesn’t matter to the one doing the grieving.
See, some of these songs are clearly about the towers falling, or the first responders, or the people lost in the fire. Some of them are about different sorts of losses — loss of a loved one, loss of a relationship, loss of innocence. But if you listen to the songs enough, you find that all those things are really not so different.
What Springsteen knows, and what he articulates so beautifully in these songs, is that 9/11 is powerful both as a real, historical event and as a symbol. Every single one of us, if we live long enough, will suffer our own personal 9/11 — a moment when something or someone we thought was a fixed, permanent fact of life is suddenly taken from us. In the space of moments, and utterly without warning, the belief collapses, or the deception is revealed, or the person leaves, or dies, leaving us bereft and bewildered. Staring at an empty sky. Most lives will have more than one of these moments.
Springsteen gives us two things for the pain. The first, very simply, is recognition. In healing from a wound, processing a loss, or recovering from a trauma, the presence of a witness can be an invaluable comfort — someone who knows what you’re going through, who sees you, simply sees you, as you are suffering, and acknowledges that the pain you feel is real, and valid.
Bruce witnesses that deep, excruciating grief in songs like “You’re Missing.” In the lyrics, he looks at his surroundings and lists what’s still around, what’s normal — “Coffee cups on the counter, / jackets on the chair / Papers on the doorstep” — and then returns, over and over, to the loss. “But you’re not there. Everything is everything, but you’re missing.” It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about grief, from poet Graham Nelson:
“Much of the sense of unfairness in grieving comes from the appalling way that a sudden absence seems to affect nothing else: not the trees in the garden, not the books on their shelves, not the crockery to be washed up. We know that the world has been transformed, and yet the world does not.”
“You’re Missing” perfectly captures that essential experience of loss, resolving into a weeping keyboard solo at the end, washing over a mournful beat and repeated string figure.
Then there’s the devastating “Paradise”, the quietest and darkest song on the record. In it, the narrator radiates pain, a pain strongly suggestive of a dead child:
Where the river runs to black
I take the schoolbooks from your pack
Plastics, wire, and your kiss
The breath of eternity on your lips
He dreams, over and over, of the one he’s lost, and returns to one thought: “I wait for paradise”. He’s waiting for nothing but death, dreaming over and over of that reunion, of crossing that river to be with the child again. But then, at the end of his dream:
I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise
They’re as empty as paradise
Even the idea of death as succor is denied him. Wishing for death when you’re alive is no road to relief — the paradise at the end of it is even emptier than the life it leaves behind.
Springsteen does more than witness for us, though. The second part of his medicine is to bring air, light, tenderness, music, hope, and life into that darkness. Not to overwhelm it, not to deny it or block it out — just enough to tinge the experience with a possibility of grace. Even “Paradise” ends with, “I break above the waves / I feel the sun on my face.”
Thesis statements for this approach bookend the album. The first song, “Lonesome Day”, is clearly about a personal loss — “Baby once I thought I knew / Everything I needed to know about you / Your sweet whisper, your tender touch / But I didn’t really know that much.” The singer is newly, unexpectedly alone, but also still grounded, knowing that “it’s gonna be okay / If I can just get through this lonesome day.” Even in the midst of personal destruction, he repeats, “It’s alright / It’s alright / It’s alright”… or it will be. And until then, all he needs to do is get through the day.
The album ends with a broader scope. “My City Of Ruins” was actually written before 9/11, about the economic wreckage of Asbury Park, but after that day, the phrase “my city’s in ruins” couldn’t help but evoke the searing images of Ground Zero, shown over and over on every American television set. Bruce takes us through those ruins, and asks, “Tell me how do I begin again?” Then he answers: “With these hands.” That phrase, repeated over and over. With these hands, I pray. With these hands, I pick myself up. With these hands, I rebuild. And finally he is shouting a new chorus: “Come on, rise up! Come on, rise up!”
That’s how hope returns. With simple survival — get through the day. With simple tasks, the work of hands, of faith, of small pieces, built up slowly into the bigger pieces that can once again let us rise up.
Other strands of vitality make their way through the album, including a strong motif of eroticism. Sensual images echo around the collection. “Let’s Be Friends (Skin To Skin)” juxtaposes two concepts within its title — friends who get “skin to skin” are surely friends with benefits, at the least. The song describes a relationship with someone who is very different from you, but who might be able to join you after all, an erotic joining urged and justified with “don’t know when this chance might come again / Good times got a way of slippin’ away.”
That theme repeats much more strongly in “Worlds Apart”, along with the image: “In your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts / May the living let us in before the dead tear us apart.” Over Middle Eastern instrumentation and chanting, Springsteeen sings of lovers (and perhaps hemispheres) separated by a huge cultural gulf, but hoping that they can “let blood build a bridge over mountains draped in stars.” There’s no question that sexuality is part of this connection — the song contains one of his sexiest and most startling lines ever: “I taste the seed upon your lips, lay my tongue upon your scars.”
The tongue makes another appearance in “The Fuse”. Against the backdrop of a funeral, and an ominous sense of impending doom, a husband and wife meet: “Quiet afternoon in the empty house / On the edge of the bed you slip off your blouse / The room is burning with the noon sun / Your bittersweet taste on my tongue.” That last line is sung a capella, the only such moment on the album. It’s a musical choice which puts enormous force behind the lyric, placing eroticism front and center as a means to cope with the inevitable loss and destruction at the other end of the titular fuse. Making love, when it’s loving, is the opposite of death — life-affirming, life-creating. It’s a beautiful antidote to the pain that pervades so many of the album’s songs, including this one.
Another antidote Bruce prescribes: music. It manifests exquisitely in “Mary’s Place.” That song has another typically bereaved narrator, carrying a locket with the picture of his lost loved one, hearing her voice on the horizon, dreaming of her in his arms, wanting to know how he can live broken-hearted. Then he puts her favorite record on the turntable, and drops the needle. Over music that slowly gathers force, Springsteen describes a song slowly gathering force: “Band’s countin’ out midnight… Floor’s rumblin’ loud… Singer’s callin’ up daylight… And waitin’ for that shout from the crowd…” The lyrics imbue the music with an almost magical power, and when the song explodes with “Turn it up! Turn it up! Turn it up!”, it’s an explosion of joy, and relief. For that moment, everything’s alright. Better than alright.
It’s a perfect reflexive moment: a musical balm about music as balm. “Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain,” the song urges, and what rains down is healing and comfort. That’s The Rising. Thanks, Boss, for being there when we needed ya.
Coldplay’s first single, “Yellow”, bugged me the first time I heard it. Then I heard it (approximately) 129,000 more times, and it really, REALLY bugged me. Consequently, I pretty much wrote off the band for quite a long while.
Over time I’ve warmed to Coldplay, based on a few different things, including “Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall”, “Fix You”, and Willie Nelson’s cover of “The Scientist.” So I decided to give one of their albums a chance, and fairly arbitrarily settled on this one. After a number of listens, I have a conclusion, and the conclusion is this: Coldplay is basically a bargain-price U2, if U2 was driven by piano instead of guitar, and concerned more with relationships than with the world.
Note that I mean this as neither praise nor blame, completely. I don’t think the two bands are in the same tier (which is why I say “bargain-price”), but there’s a musical comparison there. They share a penchant for the grand, the sweeping, the magnificent. They both have charismatic frontmen, a spiritual side, layered and effects-laden production. And A Rush Of Blood To The Head is not exactly Coldplay’s War, but it may be its October, which is to say that it contains several very strong tracks, and the rest of it gives the impression of a band on the verge of becoming the best version of itself.
Among the strong tracks: “Clocks”, which deservedly won the Record Of The Year Grammy in 2004 (two years after U2 snagged it twice in a row.) The song has a great melody, a super-hooky piano riff, and poetic lyrics that evoke desperation, confusion, and just a hint of salvation. There’s the aforementioned “The Scientist”, which the comic book geek in me has decided must be Reed Richards’ theme song. There’s the deep regret, the sudden understanding that he’s been neglectful, and most of all the painful contrast of intellect and emotion, of someone so skilled at pulling apart mental puzzles, but so poor at understanding other people. Underneath it all is a deep love and commitment, which we’re never quite sure will be enough.
“God Put A Smile Upon Your Face” pulls off a neat trick lyrically, taking advantage of a grammatical quirk of the word “put”, and contrasting it with the word “give”. “Give” changes form when shifting from the imperative mood to the simple past tense:
Imperative: God give me style and give me grace
Past tense: God gave you style and gave you grace
Now here’s “put”
Imperative: God put a smile upon my face
Past tense: God put a smile upon your face
Because “put” stays put grammatically, the lyrics create a tension around whether the narrator is pleading or simply recounting, creating a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety underscored by the repetition of “your guess is as good as mine.”
Finally, and my favorite, is “Amsterdam”. The whole album is emotional, but this song is at another level. The intro piano is reminiscent of the song “October” itself, in fact, as is the plaintive and searching vocal. But where this song truly excels is in its build from a spare and quiet beginning to a truly sublime and magical climax. Right at 3:57, when the drums kick in, the song just grows wings and takes to the skies. The lyrics take on a sense of majesty as it rises above the clouds. “You came along, and you cut me loose.”
Nothing else on the album comes close to those tracks. There’s a nice minor-key feel to “A Whisper”, a sinister sense in “A Rush Of Blood To The Head”, and a catchy tune on “In My Place.” But all of it has a sense of promise of what’s to come.
