CRAWLER and the Erotics of Self-Destruction
Heeey! I finally thought I would try my hand at music crit! And where better to start than with one of my favourite albums of the past few years?
Media Round-up:
Cyrano [2021] - This has a bold and silly earnestness to it that I cannot fault. Kind of wish I got more scenes of The Boys being hot and having fun!
Spencer [2021] - Executes its feelings of anxiety and being trapped incredibly well! Impressive stuff!
For the Love of Woman and Country [2021] - Oma Mahmud - Very fun fuckboy music, plays with genre (e.g mixing punk and afrobeats) in some real fun ways.
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There is something sexy about being destroyed.
I got myself together
I got myself in check
You caught me on my knees
Knees are raw red
You caught me on all fours
Smooching the floor
No metaphor
So much mental energy goes into holding myself together. To be anything other than in control is to invite harassment or violence. A decibel too loud and I’m a violent monster. An octave too deep and the customer service sheen fades. The facade must always be held up for me to continue to be allowed to exist - even in the spaces which are supposed to be a refuge. I by no means have it the worst. Growing up middle-class makes some of the aspects of performance a little easier - but at the end of the day, I am still fat and Black so that can only go so far. Bearing all that in mind, it’s a little weird to find a reprieve from that in the hands of a group of kinda corny white dudes who don’t share most of those experiences and have a whole lot of deeply insufferable fans. But there’s something about the rawness of IDLES’ music that hits across those barriers. As “get on all floors then slap that d-d-d-dancefloor, Then scream 'I'll die for the cause', What else could your lungs be for” is shouted down the mic everything melts away.
What is a moshpit but a temporary fraternity of people desperate for the catharsis of self-destruction?
I remember going to a concert of theirs at the end of 2019 in the Alexandra Palace. It was an interesting crowd, mostly hipsters x Punks x Dad-looking music nerds. I was hilariously out of place in this giant room that was exclusively white for many reasons that are fairly obvious to anyone who has interacted with the cultural conversation around IDLES (especially in 2019) and the London rock gig scene in general. However, even with all that in mind (and the inability of white people to take up physical space in a not-annoying way) it almost felt like a spiritual experience.
As a person who grew up in the pentecostal Black church, I know what it is for sounds and bodies to unfold, interlink and become one, creating a symphony from which pure energy emerges. I know what it is like to bend the knee and beg, to become enraptured, to find deep satisfaction in feeling small and mighty at the same time, to be entirely at the mercy of great power while also being the conduit for it. I also know what this temporary feeling of unity can obfuscate, how easily the people beside me could see me underfoot. There is something powerful in how IDLES perform and how Talbot commands his crowd. While the band has repeatedly rejected the label of punk they share its experimental feeling. The trick to a good punk band is creating the illusion that anyone could play like this and anyone could sing like that. It doesn't feel like you're watching an orchestrated spectacle by men who have been doing this for over a decade, it feels like a natural expression of emotion. It’s as if the songs were being birthed anew on stage each time they were played and each audience member provided a bit of the DNA. By the end of the night, I had been emptied and made new, baptised in sweat, the journey back was mostly silent.
James Baldwin's Another Country is a novel which understands the power of crowds and the allure of self-destruction - all of this is most pressing in its prologue which focuses on the tragic figure of the Black jazz musician Rufus. You watch him struggle and ultimately die because of mental illness and the weight of his circumstances as a Black man in 1950s New York City. Baldwin understands how the places that once elevated you can now choke you, the tension of being out of place and the paranoia that can come with it. The jazz bar that Rufus was once the star of becomes a hive of “bloodless people” with “pitiful or scornful or mocking eyes”.
I haven't seen IDLES since then, but I really want to see what CRAWLER feels like live. I cannot count how many times I have died and been reborn since the end of 2019 - and they aren’t exactly the same band either. Maybe this time I’d leave baptised in blood.
What if you could be destroyed instead of struggling to cling on, what if you just revel in how pathetic you feel, roll around in the mud and blood and manure and feel free? It’s the catharsis that makes this all so deeply erotic. Rufus' romance with Leona starts much the same. Almost from the moment that they meet love and the desire for self-destruction blur. When Baldwin writes about their first time having sex the imagery holds violence and eroticism in the same humid breath and it is beautiful:
Each laboured to reach a harbour; there could be no rest until the motion became unbearably accelerated by the power that was rising in them both. Rufus opened his eyes for a moment and watch her face, which was transfigured with agony and gleaned in the darkness like alabaster.
IDLES love a repeated line and CRAWLER really leans into that. Talbot growls, "Do the new sensation" over and over. Then "Progress" is a song near entirely made up of cycles and repetitions. The thrum of Adam Devonshire's distorted to fuck bass hits over and over and over again. They constantly feel as if they are pushing right to the edge of losing control and then at the last minute pull back from the edge. It’s no mean feat to reproduce the feeling of losing control but refuse to give yourself up in the process. That back-and-forth in this album is entrancing. It's like I press play and then wake up about an hour later at "The End" a different person. I don't know if that different person is better – but the hour in which the metamorphosis occurs feels so fucking good.
In Azimov's “Escape!” two men are the test dummies for hyperspeed travel. Life cannot be maintained at the speeds required for this to work. So unbeknownst to the men, the supercomputer (known as The Brain) has to make the men die temporarily and be reborn. The men are a little thrown off by the experience but ultimately unharmed. I wonder, if they tried again, would it feel good to be deconstructed, knowing rebirth was just around the corner?
It's important not to abstract too much though. While the album is all those things it is also about addiction. While I don't have an uncomplicated relationship with substances, I have never been that deep in the throes of addiction so it is important for me to not ignore that. And this also brings me to my closing point. The thing with any fantasy is that it has to end - and so does CRAWLER.
We are finite beings and there is only so much of us that can be ground down before we cease to exist at all. For Joe Talbot, that endpoint is sobriety proudly declared on stage and the declaration that "In spite of it all, Life is beautiful". For Azimov's duo, the end is rebirth. For Rufus, the end is a spiral where he is violently abusive to Leona and eventually dies by suicide. For all, The End must come.
I don’t know what that looks like for me yet.
I’m less online lately, but whsiper on the winds and maybe you’ll fine me! Always appreciate your support whether that’s verbal, financial (ko-fi.com/tayowrites) or whatever else.