“Lift Me Up” is one of Springsteen’s many triumphs, involving an improbably gorgeous falsetto over faint guitar and a layer of composed, swelling keyboard synthetic. His voice is haunting and almost unknowable compared to the grit and grunt of famed Springsteen deliveries. It’s a unique instrument, only ever accompanied by the track’s own instrumentation (all executed by Springsteen), never obscured. The song conveys the same sensibilities as “Streets of Philadelphia”, “Gave It a Name”, and “Sad Eyes”; slow, assured and ethereal. Most importantly, it is highly affecting. And Springsteen’s lyrics are compelling. They are curt, and without ever conveying the clarity of storytelling they settle in the bones. The lyrical nuances, the dance between the romantic and the adulterous, make for an emotionally involving, appealingly earnest narrator. I’m convinced of an air of guilt and a sorrowful tone, however; the risk-taker come undone, aiming toward an act of atonement–one unanswered. Whether it’s in the rejection of tradition (“I don’t need your answered prayers / I don’t need your sacred vow”) or the unreliable promises of tomorrow (“When the morning bright / Lifts away this night / We will find our love”), there’s an unresolved struggle between long term and short term happiness.
On Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015, I attended a Mountain Goats concert in the Culture Room in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. It was a positive life experience. Because I process the world this way — and, given the popularity of Buzzfeed, so do you — I will relay the experience in bullet points:
My friends While and Fides met me at my apartment on Miami Beach, and we drove my white Jetta north. Initially Fides sat in the front seat, but then he realized he was too high to navigate, so he got out and swapped with While, who pulled up Waze on his phone.
We stopped at a gas station because my dashboard light was on. While and Fides ran across the street to the Pizza Hut/Taco Bell and returned with several supreme personal pan pizzas. Apparently, both chains (as well as KFC) are owned by Yum! Brands, which peeled off from PepsiCo in 1997. I did not know this. Now I do.
The pizza was greasy and I got some hand grease on the steering wheel.
While and Fides talked about spoarts the whole way up. My friend Fitzgerald called me out for hanging out almost exclusively with women lately. This is why. Spoarts are so fucking basic. They’re the worst.
The Culture Room is in a strip mall in Fort Lauderdale. As we pulled up, While claimed that the only band to reference Fort Lauderdale in a song is Mötley Crüe (in Girls Girls Girls). We talked briefly about the length of Tommy Lee’s penis in the Pamela Anderson sex tape.
To enter, security made us empty our pockets and patted us down. I brought my one-hitter, so I stood out in the drizzle holding my pot between my phone and wallet while some dude felt up my legs. He let me in.
The Culture Room is tiny. I felt uncomfortable lighting up because security would have been able to see me too clearly. I settled for plastic cups of Makers Mark instead, as we posted up against a wall with a good view (like I said, the venue was tiny). At some point, a super tall dude came and stood right in front of me.
While pointed out that the opening band must have had a lot of turnover, because none of them had the same fashion sense. One of them wore jean shorts and a floral shirt with rolled up sleeves. But all of them had long hair. I am forever jealous of the consistency with which indie rockers can grow full heads of long hair.
We were about an hour late, so we caught the last two songs of the opener and then waited for the Mountain Goats to come on. I sipped on Makers.
Outfits. Darnielle wore a tweed jacket he found in your university professor’s closet. His red shirt read, in old timey font, “I hope you suffer.” His pants were salmon. He did not match. The bassist wore a plaid suit with a tie and pocket square. The drummer also wore a suit and pocket square (no tie). The saxophonist had on jeans and a denim shirt, so he was probably from Canada.
I recently attended a wedding. In preparation I watched several videos about how to fold pocket squares. We have little idea, when we are young, how much effort it takes to look sharp. There are a lot of ways to fold a pocket square, but probably the best is to crumple it randomly and shove it in the pocket. Life’s silly like that.
The other time I saw the Mountain Goats, at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, they had a three-man horn section. The addition of a baritone sax was a nice touch this time, but the sound wasn’t nearly as full as in LA. It didn’t help that Darnielle’s guitar was way too loud in the mix and they had other sound issues.
Darnielle is perhaps the best poet in this country. I looked out at the crowd. I saw gauged ears, a black manchild with bleached hair, a girl with a bandanna like Rossie the Riveter. It felt incongruous. Here are Miami bros. Here is poetry set to tender sax about the pathos of professional wrestling in the 1980s. I wanted everyone to be two decades older.
At some point, Fides walked over to me, kissed me on the temple, and said, “I love you, man.” I nodded. Then he walked back to While with two drinks in hand.
I wanted to dance, but I didn’t dance.
In the middle of the set, the rest of the band left and Darnielle played some slow songs alone. I remember really digging this part the last time I saw the Goats. This time it was boring, probably because I didn’t know any of the songs he picked. He said he likes to wing that section much as possible.
I’m going to tell you how Darnielle introed one song. All of his intros are great; Darnielle is a soul-toucher. When he talks, he touches souls. I’m concerned I’ll ruin the effect, trying to remember what he said this far after the show. So. The one intro. Darnielle was explaining that when he was 19, after high school, he worked at a burger place called Jakey’s. His boss was a lady who got the restaurant as a gift from her husband. “I don’t want to say she was a bad person, but she behaved in a manner that made one suspect she had every capability of being one.” Darnielle worked six days a week. On the seventh day, his boss made him come in for the lunch shift, so he asked if he could get a free lunch. She said no. He called her “sub-human.” He mused about how back then, that was the most freedom he had: to mouth off to his boss a little bit, but not too much. But when you’re in the ring! When you’re wrestling bad guys! Then the glory of your vengeance can be visited upon the audience, and from your trousers you can pull a Foreign Object.
When they played High Hawk Season, I remembered Malaysia, and how I used to shower with the door open, listening to this song. Then I remembered how in Asia they put the light switches outside of the bathrooms. Whenever I got drunk, I would flip off the lights while my roommates were taking shits. Then I’d scamper away giggling. I was young then, with so much of my life still to waste. I’m 29 now. I’ve fired friends. I’ve failed at things I tried really hard at for a long time. I can feel my body sagging. I looked out over the crowd, at how they were all so young, still so far from 30. Sometimes I wish I had that age back so I could be silly and careless. Other times I don’t. But on this night I did.
The set ended with This Year and the encore closed with with Spent Gladiator 2. Both songs are about survival. Both songs mean a lot to me.
Here’s something you probably don’t know about me: I have thought about suicide every day for the last six years, essentially my entire adult life. I don’t doubt that one day my brain will kill me. Some days it’s only in passing — the idle blip poking through my warm contentedness, arguing that I should probably end it now because it won’t get any better than this. Other days it’s thick, dozens of times frantically in a row, with specific plans and goodbye notes scrawled out in my head. That’s when I listen to the Mountain Goats a lot. I don’t know any other band that writes anthems about staying alive.
After the show we hung out under an awning while Fides smoked a cig, watching the downpour around us. Eventually we gave up waiting and made a run for it, leaping over puddles and through the strip mall parking lot. I wiped my hand through my wet hair. We were drenched by the time we got to the car, but still alive.
The stretch of track lines from Wolli Creek all the way through to Central Station, Sydney, has sketchy cellular connectivity. If Spotify holds out, it’s a blessing. If not, aurally the landscape is largely sniffles and sighs and polite, blunted coughs. Visually business suits, freshly-ironed buttoned-down shirts, and backpacks span the carriages. The weary conductor, announcing the present and subsequent stops, crackles over the intercom. Suburb to suburb, he sounds less tired-guy-following-procedure and more like death itself.
I’m sure he’s a nice guy, the conductor. Once, of an afternoon, my friend James and I were shooting the shit at the Marlborough Hotel in Newtown, ordering lunch. Some portly, curly-haired bloke – whose name I can’t recall – was sitting with some people, practicing card tricks the table over. Catching our interest, we ate together. After the usual how-do-you-do’s, one of Curl’s friends discussed his life as a train driver. “Mostly routine,” he said, “but people jump in front of trains a lot. A fucking lot.” The media doesn’t report them all, fearing copycats I guess, and it’s common for drivers to quietly bear the horror and guilt, despite the wide range of support given to employees who experience it first-hand.
I asked him if he had ever hit anybody. He had. He was working a wet line into the city circle and this guy was standing at the platform’s edge holding an umbrella, sheltered from the rain and watching the train approach. He said it was the detail that stayed with him. The man’s expression, watching this angled form of metal and gears and weight coming towards him, as if timing when it was going to be too late to stop. The slump of his shoulders as he fell. Most of all, he recalled that this particular person didn’t let go of the umbrella. It was one of a thousand things that made it difficult to comprehend, but it seemed ridiculous and inconsequential – “Who cares about the fucking umbrella?”
“But, if you’re going to kill yourself, why bring it on to the platform? Why hold on to it when you jump? What does it matter?” He said those kinds of questions ring around the inside of your skull months and months later.
“To this day I can still tell you the colour of the mohair jumper she was wearing, the colour of her jeans, what shoes she had on, and what injuries she had suffered.”
Curls’ friend also told the story of a former train driver, a man who – at least back then – spent his time far from the tracks. He would wear his conductor slacks and stayed on the payroll, preparing administrative papers mostly. He didn’t know the number of deaths or any more details, but he speculated it wouldn’t have to be many. Even one was already too much.
[Seek help. Find hope. For those in Australia, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 – for anything. Even if you just need somebody to talk to. Internationally, the IASP has a listing for crisis centres across the world. Reach out. You are not alone.]
iii Points is a three-day festival in Miami with a lot of EDM, hip hop, and slow, trippy rock. I attended the 2015 edition, on Oct. 9, 10, and 11. Before I explain what each day was like, here’s some background info:
The three ‘points’ best I can figure are: music, art, and technology. There were art exhibits and techy things all over the campus. One of my coworkers hosted a virtual reality booth. Basically, it’s a playground for high teens who want to look at bright colors.
The venue is about a block from the Wynwood strip. Wynwood was the shitty party of town until Miami made a very conscious effort to gentrify it. Now there’s huge graffiti murals and tons of bars and the hipsters congregate every weekend to dance. The actual iii Points venue is an open lot littered with neon pyramids and oriental rugs. There were two inside rooms (the main stage and one for djs), two outside stages, and a line of food trucks.
Tickets, will call, and drink wristbands were across the street in Wynwood Soccer.
I showed up late on Friday, because I had to make an appearance at Nando’s 30th birthday party. It was surprisingly formal: professionally catered (paella), a bartender, little glittery 30s scattered on the tables. Nando’s mom tried to convince her friends to check out this Bernie Sanders character, who has some really good ideas and you should totally look into. Everyone else besides me (who got an invite the day before over text) wore a button-down. I’m 29 now, bracing for the next birthday. Too old to be showing up to formal events in band t-shirts.
Earlier that day, I picked up Nando from his apartment and was playing Tame Impala. He called it crap. “People don’t sing anymore. What is this breathy, ethereal vocal shit?” I turned on Bob Seger and we sang Against The Wind, loudly.
My friend Freeze and I have an ongoing conversation about the age when one stops searching out new music. It’s different for each person, of course, and dependent on life events. If you have a baby and a career by 25, you probably aren’t spending free time and money on new music. But at some point, nearly every adult falls back on the bands she already knows she likes.
I thought I hit my moment two years ago, when I gave up weekends (and this blog) to run a TV show with Nando. It was worth it. I loved television.
By the time I left the party and made it to Wynwood it was nearing midnight, which isn’t a crazy time to go out in Miami. All the bands I wanted to see that night started after 12 anyway (except Panda Bear, who I had to skip so that Nando could grow old). On my way in, I bumped into Alice, who was leaving. She gave me her folding fan and said the air conditioning broke in the main stage. She said if I got an offer of over $10 for the fan, to sell it and split the money with her.
All my other, younger friends got there after I did. Then it became a maze of texts and missed calls and lost directions as we combined and split up and bumped into each other again. There were too many people in Wynwood so I stopped getting reception. Sterling fed me sips of Jameson from a flask she’d smuggled in her bra. It was drunken and sloppy and people kept getting lost and frustrated.
In this milling about, being pulled around by people and giving up and just going to bands I wanted to see, I ended up catching snippets of Mano Le Tough, Neon Indian, Nicolas Jaar, and DJ Tennis.
I’ve wanted to see Mano Le Tough for a long time. He plays what my friend Arielle coined sadboi techno. I played a song for Brent. “It says: I’m sad inside, but I still want to roll.” This set was more straight-up dj dance stuff. He didn’t sing at all. It made me want to move to East Berlin so I could see him all the time at Berghain. Arielle is the one who got me into EDM. We would go on road trips and she would guide me through the history of deep house, or play all her favorite Italo Disco tracks, or just lull me to sleep with Le Tough late at night.
At one point, the entire group found each other at the exact same time, in front of the soundboard for Neon Indian. There were about 15 of us. Then we looked to our left, and it was a bunch of other coworkers we didn’t know were coming. Then after greeting the new crew, I realized that two of my Miami Herald friends were standing next to them. The world felt very small and manageable.
Neon Indian sucked, so we left to catch Nicolas Jaar. This memory will stick with me. Two very drunk girls led the way to the very front. The room was long and narrow, and the lights splayed out from behind Jaar out toward the crowd. It felt like a movie scene, in the club, where the boy follows some spunky girl through the crowd and throbbing music. It was very surreal, and a touch magical.
On the second day, I rolled two root beer-flavored drops from Denver around in my mouth. They kicked in two hours later. I poured healthy swallows of Sterling’s Jameson into cans of Becks. We were the first two there, so we watched Telescope Thieves. A topless girl in body paint walked by handing out fliers. Later, we saw two more. They were advertising a nude afterparty.
This is Miami, so clothing is always minimal. Most girls wore jean shorts and sideboob halter tops. I saw one guy with full Miami Vice ’70s ‘fro and mustache, dancing away. He amused me. Everyone else wore what youths wear today.
The group had weaned since day one, so five of us parked in the main stage to see Run the Jewels and Ghostface Killah. Sterling ran off. I later found out two of my other friends were in the crowd, but I didn’t see them.
All the rappers we saw were really sincere. Killer Mike at one point went, “This one’s for Ferguson.” Ghostface mentioned how touched he is that people in every country have Wu-Tang tattoos. The reprieve was MF Doom. He was listed as playing with Ghostface, but they didn’t overlap. Instead, they projected Doom on a huge white sheet and added some grainy effects. Apparently, Doom’s not allowed back in the country. He started by playing bizarre old timey blues stuff, then he’d hit a spliff and wander off camera. In the background palm trees swayed. No one was sure what was happening. I thought it was just intro music for Ghostface, but then it stretched on toward an hour mark. My friend Kit got weirded out and left.
Eventually there was a lot of static and Doom reappeared, still in New York Islanders jersey and orange do-rag, this time from behind his dj set, and he rapped a bunch. It was good shit.
Before him was Run the Jewels. I found them entirely cheesy. They kept chanting back and forth in ways that reminded me of Christian rap from my childhood. I was pleased in a way, because I’ve been trying to like them for a while and can’t get into it. Now I know: I’m just not into it.
Ghostface, of course, killed it.
After that, even though it was only midnight, I went home. The edibles had worn off, I didn’t want to see anyone else that night, and I was tired. So, because I’m an old, I went home.
Everyone who gave me shit about bowing out early the night before didn’t make it out on the third day. So fuck ’em. I can party just like a youth.
I came with Brown and Miriti, sucking on two hard candies again. We showed up just in time for Jay Electronica, who called a slew of people onto the stage and had two of them spit bars with him. He said the first time he ever performed in front of people, Mos Def pulled him out of a crowd like that.
Again, the sincerity.
Meanwhile, Brown kept making up rhymes and fake words and laughing. It was a lot of this:
Jay Elec went over his allotted time. He apologized to the guys after him, but didn’t actually care enough to, you know, stop when he was supposed to.
The guy after him turned out to be Spooky Black. Brown kept hyping him up. “He’s this white teenager in a do-rag, but then he starts singing and out comes the dope ass R&B.” So we stuck around. Turns out, Brown only likes Spooky Black because he thinks he’s hilarious as a concept. It’s this Jesse Pinkman-looking teenager with an oversized hoodie who absolutely cannot sing, singing what is essentially emo R&B.
At one point, Brown just broke down into a full-on laugh. He was doubled over, nearly slapping the sticky floor. I couldn’t help it and burst out laughing too. Miriti turned away and chuckled to himself. It was so bad it was funny.
Now, remember I was pretty high. But it was around this point that the illusion started to fade. Reality curled up at the edges. All I could see was a scared teenager, pretending to be a singer, walking around the stage in a too-big hoodie, the lights and music drowning out his terror.
Then it started to spread. I kept looking around and seeing pimples on teenage faces, silly bikini-bottom costumes, all the pomp that we put on for each other. It felt fake. Who knew if anything was any good. Maybe no one can sing? Maybe we’re all faking it, and sometimes we’re tricked, and other times all the smoke machines and neon lights and sick beats can’t hide what frauds we are.
Between sets, Brown explained the etymology of trap.
We stayed for King Krule, but that kid couldn’t sing either. Eventually we shuffled over to the dj room, and I swayed my body back and forth and closed my eyes. Miriti and I got bored and convinced Brown to leave before Unknown Mortal Orchestra. We’re old. He played UMO in the Uber on the way back.
Post-script
On Monday I got sick. I’m drinking a glass of Emergen-C as I write this.
Part of the reason I was tired Saturday and Sunday nights was that I’d had boozy brunches both days. On Saturday, I met up with my friend Figgy. She was telling me about this Nirvana documentary she watched, and how it made her nostalgic for the ’90s. She said pop culture was so much better back then, and she missed it. I said she’d be nostalgic for now too, given enough time. She disagreed.
Figgy is wrong. I’ll miss these times, the last fumes of my 20s. When girls’ ass cheeks hung out of their shorts, and Arielle taught me about house, and girls fed me bra whiskey, and I took drugs and listened to EDM and hip hop until way past my bedtime.
“It’s all in the family…When they said he’s ill / Laughed it off as if it’s no big deal.”
Tropic of Cancer‘s opening lines are a denial. They are a supine stance in the face of impending familial tragedy, but it’s a stance unshared by the singer: “What a joke to joke. No joke.” The song reaches its most revealing upon the hard K in “joke” at 1:44. It’s understated, easily missed–to be mistaken for a mistake, even–but it’s venomous and indicative of a pain still very much alive, in itself cancerous if unchecked. The moment is transient and intuitive and unnervingly beautiful, one of the most stunning vocalised moments in music. Vsevolozhsky’s sample, looped in dub fashion, is weightless and expertly stretched and decelerated to accommodate syllabic expression–a configured inducement to hear the contradiction that is Panda Bear, an enigmatic artist yet entirely confessional.
Panda Bear has expressly stated that his Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper LP is not about death. Instead, it is a representation of changes in identity. The beauty of music is the ability to project upon it one’s own experience and sentiments. The emotive nature of music can be molded to suit. In a sense, however, we cheat music and the artist’s intentions each time we read into music what isn’t there. Tropic of Cancer‘s beginnings are of death (life reversed), to be sure, but to reject the refrain and what follows is to reject the certainty that with death one is altered; one has evolved.
“And you can’t get back / You won’t come back / You can’t come back to it.” Can’t. Won’t. Can’t again.
Locked in the present and finitely bolted to a future, we’re mandated to carry with us an unchangeable past. This is not to call our journey ill-fated, however. If we’re fortunate to live long into the future, pain will be a staple of our sensation’s diet and death key to our experience, for what we live is a single opportunity experience. To dismiss sickness and death as an anomaly, as impairing our experience, is to shortchange our own fate–our only fate.
“Sick has to eat well, too / Got to like it all / Got to like what kills.”
TUNE THE PROLETARIAT is yet another useless music blog, of which there are too many -- precious little blogs created by self-indulgent fucks who think their opinions are somehow more meaningful and more beautiful and more insightful than yours. Fuck those guys, man. Fuck 'em long and fuck 'em hard.
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