If the snake bites before it is charmed
There’s no advantage in a charmer
“I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.”
Ecclesiastes 1:14
“Everything ages poorly”
Drug Church - ‘Chow’
Perform Self-Examination
Is it worth it to ask a coworker to work harder if he once shared that a former foster parent stabbed him in the hand with a fork when he was a kid?
This guy would come to work sober maybe once a week, and even if he was sober his interest in working hard or even much at all was a toss up—sometimes smartphones are just as bad as morning beers and lunchtime edibles for on the job consistency. I hate yelling at people, as goosed-up as I may get in the short term. And I don’t think anyone on a job site contributes to another person’s epiphany about the direction of his or her life, especially if they were abused.
I think I’m only just recently coming out of a delusion that I could righteously contribute to anyone’s growth, meanwhile excusing all my own compulsive and self-destructive behaviors.
I do love working hard, and I’ve found purpose in my own life through physical labor.
That should be good enough, as far as living a good life goes.
But there’s an instinct I have, (hopefully a dying one), to mess around with the lives of people I meet. I went to school a lot: high school, undergraduate, graduate. I do know for certain that the most fruitful outcome of those experiences was meeting my wife, but I think they also left me with a dormant impulse to act like I know more or have a clearer picture of some kind of truth then people who didn’t pass all those tests.
Listen to Drug Church, Read Ecclesiastes
Maybe my favorite band of the past five years is Drug Church.
I’ve been wanting to write some kind of contemplative review of their new album PRUDE.
After church the other day, (regular church, not Drug Church), the congregation celebrated the service of the outgoing church administrator. In her speech honoring the administrator, our pastor referred to the book of Ecclesiastes and how despite all its existentialism and cynicism, the author emphasized how life revolves around loving people, sharing meals with people, and committing to labor of personal value.
Ecclesiastes has this roughened existential bitterness to it that is a literary attitude I’m magnetized to. Probably once a year in college I read the memoir The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer. There was this minor character, a bartender, who Moehringer described (this is a blurry paraphrasing) “as having a face like he knew everything was fucked.” But this character ended up being one that I related to immediately. He was jaded, cynical, but portrayed as consistently kind. Tired. But kind.
My connection with Drug Church began around when they were initially touring in support of their last full-length LP, Hygiene. They’re a very musical aggressive rock band, shouted vocals with very catchy melodies, like if someone threw ice cream at your face and then gently handed you another ice cream afterward, and both times it was your favorite flavor.
The chorus of “Super Saturated”, track two on Hygiene, was one of the first pieces of Pat Kindlon’s lyricism that I would repeat over and over.
The dirt under your nails
The proof that you've been here
Let's add up your wrongs
A rabid mob to audit who you are
As a concept, Hygiene seems to see Kindlon digging into what causes human beings to check over the fence to make sure their neighbor is doing the right thing rather than maintain the garden in their own yard. There’s also some early warnings of this on Cheer, the album prior to Hygiene. On “Unlicensed Hall Monitor,” Kindlon outlines the type of person who fixates on correcting individual behavior with no self-awareness of his own disreputable choices:
There’s a guy with a search history darker than a sea trench
Telling you how to live
Closet, crawlspace, attic full of skeletons
It’s a close connection that exists between Kindlon’s frustrations with behavioral policing and Ecclesiastes’ compassionate cynicism, because like the “born asshole” Kindlon writes about in “Unlicensed Hall Monitor,” Ecclesiastes reminds us that “surely there is no one on earth so righteous as to do good without ever sinning.” Kindlon even doubles down on the indignation with these kinds of social supervisors on the song “The Bitters” off Prude:
Picking through each other's trash
Gnawing at each other's bones
It's not righteous it's just control
Standing by themselves, these musical and biblical narratives might present as just embittered with no kind of way forward.
A priest associate who gave the sermon the day when we thanked the outgoing administrator asked the question “is this all that there is?” And I think it’s safe to ask a similar question in the context of listening to Drug Church. So we’ve got skewered social cops, protests against mob behavior, but not a lot of “where do we go from here” or, “is this all that there is?”
I remember an English professor sharing in class that you shouldn’t ask a writer what they meant by something because they may write with instinct and not even know why they made a choice. But I think it’s safe to say that Kindlon’s lyricism on Prude is something of a resolution or at least answer to how Cheer and Hygiene may ask “is this all that there is?”
I Didn’t Expect to Feel this Way
There’s a detectable surge of humaneness on Prude.
“Hey Listen” eulogizes a young man who is lost to the anonymity of becoming a social services wash out—maybe my coworker who’s life was an hourly crap shoot. This song, track three on Prude, is purely fucking sad. Just sad. It may be the most transparently sad song Drug Church recorded. Musically, it’s one of their most beautiful. Nick Cogan’s signature choral guitar repeats a jangly arpeggio that supports Kindlon’s observational lyrics as he looks at a “bulletin board of missing teens” in a Wal-Mart. There’s no call to action in “Hey Listen.” Some kind of “how do we prevent this from happening” that will be contrived and function to assuage those who refuse to that there may be no clear reason why people live worse than them, and that they can’t do anything about it. But “Hey Listen” may be something better than starting another non-profit to help vulnerable kids, which really will just morph into something self-serving. It’s a song about a man acknowledging he’s helpless but he doesn’t turn away from acknowledging this picture reminds him of “half my high school friends.”
No more recent image
All the questions it invites
It's tough to find an upside
In what seems like a cursed life
No more recent image
I'm still thinking of this kid
And how some folks are so lucky
And other folks are him
Maybe Kindlon’s aid for the ailing condition is to write a great song.
“God has long ago approved what you do,” writes the author of Ecclesiastes. “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might.” Or as Kindlon puts it on Prude’s second track “Myopic”:
Cynical not bitterness
Love my girl and friendships
I forgive all of life's hassles
The author writes earlier in the book “I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves, for this will go with them in their toil through the days of life that God gives them under the sun.”
Prude ends with an absolute anthem of self-examination. “Peer Review” seems like one of the few times in a Drug Church song (this happens plenty in Self Defense Family songs) that Kindlon is facing his frustration inward.
I’ve ridden many Greyhound buses north to south along the east coast. Bus stations are bizarre, liminal spaces, often arriving at them at 1 or 2 am in the morning when “normal” life has ceased and has transitioned into something equally comedic and threatening.
Atlanta bus station I’ll do my best to paint a picture
It’s women who spit when they smoke
It’s men who ask to borrow your phone
There’s a young guy he’s wearing no shoes
There’s an old lady who’s partially nude
Everyone mutters and everyone yells
It’s a shit dipped concrete annex of hell
That’s the scene Kindlon sets, and if you’ve ever been lucky enough to ride a Greyhound or Peter Pan, it’s perfect. One ride back from college in North Carolina to Connecticut a woman asked to borrow my phone in Baltimore. I think it was to call her boyfriend or something, and then her boyfriend just kept calling me for days to try and get a hold of her. So it’s happened enough for Kindlon to share the same experience.
“Peer Review” is a self-examination of a man’s predisposition to judge his fellow man and then acknowledging “what good is it.” After all, there’s only one bus station. There’s no bus station for the sinless and sinner. There’s just one bus station. The author of Ecclesiastes explains in his own “vain life I have seen everything; there are righteous people who perish in their righteousness, and there are wicked people who prolong their life in their evil doing. Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself?”
Or as Kindlon considers:
Eye to eye with pеople I've judged
I can't reach my perch from this place in the mud
Shoulder to shoulder with total scum
Can't they see that I'm nothing like them?
Lifeboat we're in is starting to sink
My high horse seems to be adding the weight
A sense of entitlement lodged in my mind
But if they're here and I'm here then who the fuck am I?
What’s the difference between me and that coworker who couldn’t seem to shake his interest in self-destruction?
“You can't feel superior to people you're in it with”
Drug Church – ‘Peer Review’
“The same fate comes to everyone”
Ecclesiastes 9:3
If you want to continue the discussion, send me an email or put it through the snail mail
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