exegesis
music, travel, love, change, loss, hope, music.
can I have your autograph/he said to the fat blonde actress[1]
i have an approach to travel preparation which is quick and efficient, mainly because i know that the most important parts are a) money b) ID/passport/driver’s license – anything else is something that can be organised on the fly. back when we used to come home for the summer, and i was packing for myself and the children, this was extended to include c) a stuffed duck and bear. my mother would ask me for weeks in advance if i’d packed yet. i didn’t do a damned thing except become increasingly agitated from my fear of flying, ultimately entering an overwhelming state of dread and terror which left me lying on the floor of my bedroom on the day of travel up until the hour before setting off for the airport, at which point i would arise like lazarus and calmly and methodically put things into suitcases, and it was always correct, and always enough. i don’t fly so much anymore but i actually enjoy it now, go figure – it took an absolute disaster of a flight where I honestly thought we would die to flip that particular switch. i travel mainly on trains, or driving, so would now substitute c) with 0) a playlist.[2] i’m driving tomorrow, and when i finish with this, that’s what i’ll be doing next.
you’re over the hill right now/and you’re looking for love
i first started listening to the velvet underground as a teen. i think it must have been one of my too-old boyfriends who first played them for me – in fact, i know it was. if i can be said to have a wide ranging and catholic (small c) taste in music, i owe some of it to the grown men who took my education in hand. on my first listen through the Loaded album, when he[3] sings this line i gasped. as a recent former baby, i couldn’t imagine anything more pathetic than to be over the hill, and worse, looking for love. it sounded like an absolutely corrosive verdict on that state. that it was said to the fat blonde actress of the previous verse compounded and confirmed the weight of the blow. besides, the band was the coolest of the cool art-junkie-hipster-city kids, the Factory house band! i mean come on! how could it be anything other than a sneer? there is something to be said for engaging and reengaging with things over the course of a life; i’ve come to think that for all the tightness of their construction, pop songs are pretty elastic things, and the best ones have a lot of give in them – viz., i don’t hear the line like that at all anymore.
i’ll come running to you/honey when you want me
right after this line, the narrative structure of the song starts to flake apart and become something else. lately when i listen to the song it falls very differently on my ears. i’m older, of course, and that’s part of it, but i think it’s less that than it is the fact of being at a point in my life where i am trying to figure out how to be in the world, now that the way i used to be in it has gone. there is something thrilling and terrifying about that – anything could happen, really. when i was still phobic about flying, i used to read and read about planes, flight, statistics and whatnot thinking that the knowledge might soothe me (it did not). nowadays when i fly, my heart still pounds as it always has done once we reach v1,[4] right before the little hiccup of the wheels coming up from the runway, but i’ve learned to interpret this as excitement rather than terror. in something like the same way, when i listen to the song now, i interpret this line as an companion to the apparent bleakness of the over-the-hill-and-looking-for-love one, and then i can hear a kind of compassion in the singer’s voice during both.
something’s got a hold of me/and i don’t know what
how does it feel to be figuring out how to be in the world, now that the way that you used to be in it has gone? pretty much like this.
it’s the beginning of a new age
this song is unlike many others in the catalog in that at no point does it become even the slightest bit chaotic. in fact, after this line is sung several times, there follows what i reckon is just about the most beautiful outro you ever heard, it sounds just like the light after a proper afternoon thunderstorm. it’s so hopeful that it aches, and the singing of the line and the music that follows after sounds like might, could, may – it sounds like the subjunctive mood, in other words. lately when i listen to it i find myself singing the harmony at this point, and when my voice melts into the ones on the recording i’m testifying that i believe, help thou my unbelief, only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
someone i was close to once used to say to me, do you have to pick everything apart? can’t you just let a thing be? and i guess i mostly can’t, or at least, it’s not my first instinct. part of the way i’ve learned to be in the world has meant that i enjoy taking things apart to try and reckon with them fully. this was just one more way that the idea of me didn’t quite map to the reality of me, and it used to make me feel not enough, which made me feel ashamed and so resolve to be better, different. it never worked, because it never lasted. lately though i think that whatever versions of me are in someone else’s head are none of my business. anyhow, it’s the beginning of a new age: anything could happen, really[5].
[1] all italicised lyrics are from New Age by the Velvet Underground, specifically the version found on Loaded.
[2] in honour of the zeroth law of thermodynamics, which came after the others were articulated, but considered fundamental enough to go first. when you get right down to it, zero is the ultimate first, coming before, after and even during everything else.
[3] doug yule, apparently, and all this time i thought it was lou reed. see, i fact check everything for you when i’m not flat out making it up as i go.
[4] at this point, you take off or crash – there isn’t enough runway left for you to safely abort and decelerate. in other words, you’re as committed as the pig is to breakfast.
[5] i’m going to make the playlist for my drive now, and new age will be the first and last song on it, embracing all the others i will place in between.