getting high on my own supply - 4. "WMD LUV"
episode 4: "WMD LUV" (spring 2007)
i thought of myself as "very liberal" when i was in college in the mid aughts and that mostly manifested in not being loudly/consciously racist (while attending school in one of the most segregated cities in the country and bemoaning the absence of special scholarships for mid white boys with no accomplishments or skills or history of community service), being pro abortion, saying "fuck bush" (the first thing i ever tried to buy off the internet was a "not my president" t-shirt made by fat wreck chords (it never arrived)), reading/carrying around michael moore books, voting for kerry in the 2004 election (the only time i went downtown in tallahassee other than the time i had to go to court for an underage drinking citation), and once going to a kegger that was ostensibly a benefit for the green party.
"WMD LUV", which begins with the line "i wish i was an atom bomb / so you'd have to pay attention" was a song that grew out of that ferment (also the literal ferment of a lot of solo drinking during a last spring break spent by myself reading and recording, basically the boring incel version of lennon's lost weekend). the premise of the song was that it was sung from the perspective of an atom bomb who is in love with this girl and thinking that the power of his destructive potential will turn her on. one of my favorite movies of that time was dr. strangelove and i wanted to do something with the image of the bomb ride as sex position and my fiction writing (my major) was very inspired by the tradition of magical realism starting with say donald barthelme (the writer i looked up to most at that age, even though i never had his ability to go obscure and esoteric). a story that maybe has a kinship to this one is "some of us had been threatening our friend colby"), where you make a small weird change to a world that is otherwise the same as the world we live in and the rupture of that defamiliarization reverberates.
it's hard to imagine exactly what was going through my head to inspire me to write a song romanticizing scorched earth. what i think i probably thought is i was being ironic, that the song was wryly anti-war, defamiliarizing the tropes of both weapons of mass destruction (this glib titular reference to the fake reason my country went to war in iraq, the backdrop of my college years that i basically never thought of as anything but an abstraction (if i thought of it at all)) and love ("millions wouldn't have to die if i could touch your breasts"). listening to it now, while i can find bits of the melody or the way that the tempo slows down and the mic gets closer as the glockenspiels twinkle at the end charming (this is still from before i started making almost entirely music that was quantized to a grid and bound to a tempo, which means it's sloppier and simpler but also in other ways more alive), in terms of the lyrics, the song isn't anti-war because it honestly isn't anti anything other than that no girls were in love with me. there's no meaning, it's just using "bodies ripped apart by the force of nuclear fusion" as a theme party costume, a set of bits to pun on (hiroshima, mon amour but make it a rom com!). it's hard for me now to understand how i thought bombing was a cute funny thing to write a song about.
