getting high on my own supply - 20. "american idyll"

• "american idyll" (november 2007)

deborah and i were going to the grocery store to buy ice and margarita mix today and i forgot my phone so we were listening to the radio and "friday i'm in love" by the cure came on and on the one hand it's basically a perfect pop song and on the other hand there are the lyrics of the bridge which are, in full:

dressed up to the eyes, it's a wonderful surprise
to see your shoes and your spirits rise
throw out your frown and just smile at the sound
as sleek as a shriek, spinning round and round
always take a big bite, it's such a gorgeous sight
to see you eat in the middle of the night
you can never get enough, enough of this stuff
it's friday, i'm in love

and i've quoted that whole block because i couldn't pull out one or two lines to be like "this is so bad" because they're all so bad and i wonder whether robert smith ever hears that song and is like "man, i really wish i'd spent like another twenty minutes on that bridge." probably no because he's too busy diving into the swimming pool of money the terrible bridge made him but i'd like to think he does because it's a feeling i often have listening to these old recordings and i don't have a swimming pool of money.

this song, "american idyll", as is common in my work, was originally inspired by an obvious homophone (idyll/idol/idle). that is not the part i wish i'd spent a little more time on and it's also not the opening verse which includes a reference to the nineties novelty beverage fruitopia (always historicize!) and it's not even the fact that i introduce the first bridge by sotto voce-ing an aside of "here comes the bridge" to the listener i am already singing to (since i love it when songs do that meta shit), but it's the lyrics of that first bridge which are

bombastic bashing meant to grab up all your passion
but if you don't care we won't go there
we'll quit the thrashing for the...

[chorus]
...american idyll

i've listened to the song way more times than i would recommend while trying to get myself in the mood to try writing this or any newsletter again and every fucking time i'm just like..."grab up all your passion"?!?!? "grab up"?? like literally could i have not recorded the first thing that popped into my mind that kind of rhymed?!?! i didn't think that, though, i didn't second guess myself at all because i was twenty one and i thought i was a fucking genius! i would say i miss it but overall i am much happier now as a boring creatively-blocked middle-aged person.

this song is the first in my oeuvre of what i would call a "manifesto song". in my youth i apparently needed to at fairly regular intervals write things that had the pretension and length and intensity of manifestos but in retrospect had nothing of substance to actually manifest about and were basically just "hey the thing i think is most important and you don't think is important is important PAY ATTENTION!!!" (this started out being "reality tv...PAY ATTENTION!!" and ended up with "internet as literature...PAY ATTENTION!!"). the point of this song, if one can be generous enough to think it had a point, was "hey did you guys know it's actually cool and deep that i'm lazy? and maybe it says something about america?? PAY ATTENTION!!"

on the flip side of the cringe, though, i'm glad i still have the song (that is the underlying point of this series PAY ATTENTION (to me)). i think the song has its virtues including the nice kinda midwestern emo (i never listened to midwestern emo) guitar riff and the mellotron choir in the chorus and the instrumental break with a sample of (i think) a radio interview with my undergraduate creative writing professor (idk 🤷), but the thing i am thinking of in particular is the lyrics of the last bridge (which structurally does a trick i like with bridges where you've heard a bridge a few times in a song before a chorus and then it's like after a chorus let's kick into super bridge), where, in my best leithauser, i growl

the american idyll
our whims are our bibles
we're searching the sidewalk
for chalk to inscribe 'em

to be clear, it doesn't really have any substance but i think the multis are nice and sidewalk chalk is not a bad analog of my artistic and intellectual depth at the time. something i remember actually saying in my early twenties when it seemed to people like me who were not really informed about the world but thought that we were all riding skyward on the obama hope and change bus to the end of history was "the second bush administration was the happiest time in my life" which was both literally true (it was when i was in college after being completely isolated and depressed in high school) and disgustingly glib in how it reflected my ability to distance myself from all the awful things that (i knew) we did and had done and would continue to do. america is a trash country and has been since this land was stolen and i'll be ashamed of it forever (while i only have to be ashamed of the lyric "grab up all your passion" for another ten or fifteen years).