October 20, 2024

"Come up screaming...!" (one to fast forward thru tbth)

I got most of the way through writing this and almost deleted it - what's the point really, eh? And what am I even doing here? You're guess is as good as mine really. But that didn't seem like a mode that's very open, and, I dunno, in for a penny in for a pound - plus I just, again I dunno, I just like typing I guess? and yeah, I could type and keep it on my hard drive, but it's meant to be slightly communicative, though only slightly really. Related: I don't get into this below, I just creep up and stand right near it. Current events are making me lose some of my interest in discussion, shrinking the circles of people I want as interlocutors or to be an interlocutor with. (Did I write about this here already previously? I can't recall. Maybe it was an aborted post too, I dunno I dunno I dunno.) And that hurts. It's a mode less open, as it were, a diminishment, a retracting, and it's lonelier, closed off. It's walking around in the intellectual equivalent of a defensive crouch, giving me the emotional equivalent of a backache. Sucks. Bad times, my friends, bad times. Alright anyway, you're probly better off to punch the fast forward button here as it's just me going 'hey this song about being sad and mad reminds me of this other song about being sad and mad and as my reasons for being sad and mad change, so too does how I hear this stuff, whodathunkit amirite?!' ("Don't say I didn't, say I didn't warn ya.")

*

Music on my mind tonight, and as usual my mind’s moving circuitously, noisily. I’ve mentioned that Malik and I made a record. (https://malikgrey.bandcamp.com/album/ferment-rot) I’m a fan of it, I like how it sounds, and I like Malik’s lyrics too. One that I thought about a lot is on “No Victory Lap,” the opening: “wake up, fuck up, now the rest of the day gone, seven times in a row, now the whole week is stupid,” in a voice that’s understated, a mix of sullen and reserved, in a way that sounds to me like barely holding it together - stay buttoned up or break the fuck down, kinda thing - though maybe I’m projecting.

I started off tonight’s listening by randomly remembering that this band I love, the Lawrence Arms, went through a phase where for a while they would sprinkle bits of 80s songs into interludes in their own songs in live shows, like from “I Melt With You” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday” and “So Lonely.” That last one was especially powerful in my opinion. I’m not sure I have this right, memory’s not fully trustworthy, but that was in an interlude in their song “The Last One,” a dear favorite - sounds to me Bivouac-era Jawbreaker - that didn’t get play commensurate with its greatness. (And isn’t that the fucking way of the fucking world? Nothing gets play commensurate with its greatness, artistically speaking I mean, outside very exceptional circumstances, because the hellworld’s organized in line with the imperatives of profit and the stupid whims of the petty tyrants, bubble-dwelling philistines all by virtue (vice! fuck you!) of the tyranny, that the profit imperative keeps installing over and over.)

So I put on “So Lonely” and I think it holds up. If anything, I’m at my most musically open-minded ever (punk was world-expanding but encouraged me to be closed-minded too, aging out of punk - look I admit, okay? and I admit I’m embarrassed I care enough to still be embarrassed about it; these low forms made me what I am at least as much as anything fancy ever did) so I’m most primed to appreciate The Police (that name though, ugh). The best bit of “So L0nely” is in the long breakdown where the lead vocal sings the title, and a back up vocal responds “I feel so low, I feel so alone, I feel so lonely.” (Typing this, I started to write, “much like how the backing vocals are the very best part of the chorus to “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” and then I thought about “it’s time I had some time alone” as a facet of that song, something I’ve never once thought about before despite listening to the song easily hundreds of times. There’s probably a metaphor in that, and as for time alone, well it’s force-feeding or famine, innit?) “So Lonely” made me think of the sense of disconnect and isolation that I wrote about that in my ‘broken sociality’ essay, which there’s another iteration of now in that some people I know aren’t following or worse are taking really wrong positions on the genocide in Gaza; once again the world feels fractured, an ice floe breaking apart and we’re standing on different chunks floating away from each other.

It also made me think of Stan Weir’s powerful and sad essay “I Am Lonely” (https://libcom.org/article/i-am-lonely-stan-weir) about, well, intellectual-political loneliness, a specific type: Weir passed through various experiences of struggle and organization, they made him who he was, and as that new self Weir led a life carrying him away from those experiences - and they became more rare in the world too - while he continued to try to do intellectual work inspired by them and which might help, to the limited degree the written word ever can, to enrich those experiences or make them that little bit more likely.

It seems like at least in the contemporary world loneliness is baked in to the lifecourse at more than one point, unfortunately, and then there are the various social and historical contexts that are loneliness-fostering as well, plus unevenly distributed elements of individual life that likewise foster loneliness - the effects of various kinds of oppression and poverty. And inflecting and inflected by all that, I think a life on the left includes an important degree of periodic loneliness and a kind of intensified awareness of loneliness by contrast: what I mean is there are moments of intense, heady togetherness in various ways in a life on the left, those shape us in various ways, and it can sensitize us so that the periods of isolation are even more painful for a while. I think that’s part of what’s going on in that Weir essay. I’m also thinking of Hannah Proctor’s book Burnout, about living with or after political defeat. That too creates loneliness.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before or not but I’ve lately been wondering about the idea of anomie as I remember hearing it second or third hand. Emile Durkheim wrote about it and I’m pretty sure I was assigned to read it in a college class and that I never read it. The way I recall having the concept explained to me, anomie is a condition of relative normlessness and it’s a condition that characterizes a society as a whole. That seems unlikely to me to really exist, as societies seem to have norms baked into their society-ness. What I think also happens and gives that idea some plausibility is that sometimes new norms emerge and old ones pass away such that people are in effect becoming disenrolled in prior shared sets of reference points and woldviews and entering new ones, so that differences in what norms people are oriented to or enrolled in proliferate. I suspect this is especially common in capitalist societies compared to other kinds, because of the violent dynamism of capitalism, and I further suspect this is baked in to Raymond Williams’s account of dominant cultures that change over time internally and in relation to alternative and oppositional cultures, old and new. The last few years of intense and global social murder and the genocide this past year bring about changes along those lines, I think, some old norms breaking down for different people and new ones arising and it all adding up to a nontrivial degree of fragmentation: we don’t really live in the same worlds in important respects. (Obviously the loneliness and interpersonal disconnections are the least important part of that; its rootedness in bloodshed and the effects of that bloodshed are far more important.)

One other thought: I’ve said before that jungle is good pandemic music because jittery and skittery and not lyric-centered. I stand by that. I think maybe the formal side of music, the instrumental side or whatever, and genre changes, have some nontrivial relationship to the social dynamics I’m rambling about and how they manifest in our lives/what it’s like to live through them. In a lot of this post I’m rambling about song lyrics specifically, and I continue to think song lyrics matter a great deal in general as a form of writing and thinking and also in my own life they’ve been huge (I think that I think about - think with and through - Propagandhi lyrics at least once a week and have done for at least the last 20 years, for instance). But sometimes we have experiences to which the words we currently know aren’t adequate yet, and music, the sonic or instrumental side, and other abstract sorts of art can speak to that in important respects I think - as with the relationship between jungle and the pandemic. I’ve also been really drawn again to Godflesh’s music lately, slow and grinding and hostile but specifically a defensive hostility, not an intrusive aggression but an aggressive assertion to back off, drive away everything that crowds around. That music is also - and the lyrical simplicity and minimalism echoes this - significantly about speechlessness or the inadequacy of words, and the self-reflexive awareness thereof: I need to talk about this but it outstrips my language and that compounds my distress, kinda thing. (My own stupid little drone and ambient project, AGED, is significantly about that, to the minimal degree it’s ‘about’ anything at all beyond passing the time and noodling around trying to make a computer sound like an analog instrument played badly by a space alien.)

Annnnnnywayyyyyy, I was listening to “So Lonely” and that put me onto “In A Big Country” which is the best song I know of where the band’s own name appears in the song (yes, even better than the Ramones covering “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”). I heard “In A Big Country” at work the other day, to my great surprise. I was walking by a classroom and someone facilitating the class or meeting played that song! I almost stopped to see what was going on but I had to get to a meeting myself. Meetings keep us from art sometimes - that’s a little too on the nose; this life’s badly written, gotta get my agent to get me onto a better one.

I digress, back to “In A Big Country.” The line “I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered but you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered” really speaks to me a lot, too much really, about a lot, too much really - one of those things of needing to stay buttoned up to not break down I guess, because life’s too full of weeks that are stupid. And THEN there’s the shouted “stay alive!” and like, yes, of course, absolutely, do that, that’s really important, though it always hit a little sad given that Stuart Adamson wasn’t able to make himself keep living, and it hits different now, sadder still, after a fairly viscerally felt few years of social murder and an even more viscerally felt year of genocide.

And what ALSO grabbed me is the background-vocal-and-delay-effect-emphasized phrase “come up screaming!” I first heard it, and often still do hear it, as a powerful scream of protest: I hear it as the same sense as in the Dillinger Four song “Contemplate This On The Tree Of Woe,” part of the refrain is “ there's a change coming on, we gotta right these fucking wrongs. They can cover their ears but we won't stop screaming!” Especially live, in their powerful voices, the Dillinger Four line felt like a statement of our power and of political possibility. But I don’t think that’s really the sense of the screaming in In A Big Country. There the line goes “pull up your head off the floor, come up screaming, cry out for everything you ever might have wanted,” then the lines I quoted about about pain, truth, shattered hopes. Surely the insisting “stay alive!” is directed at that person, who isn’t getting what they might have wanted - there the call to scream is really a call to keep breathing, it seems to me, because if you scream then you breathe (sadly the world is such that the reverse is often true too).

My mind also went back to the D4 song, which I love and think often of but which has also come to land differently after living through all this covid death and genocide. When I first heard the song it was toward the end of the Bush administration and start of the Obama administration. I’d been to a ton of antiwar marches, a brief stint doing some organizing for my job, gone through the layoff and precarity wringer then into grad school and a grad student unionization effort. In that context, the image of screaming upward at them even when their ears are covered was an image of our tenacity - we shall not be moved, kinda thing - and of our eventual victory - we shall overcome, kinda thing - with that victory’s link to screaming more than a little vague: do we scream up to them until they finally listen and do what we demand? Or do more and more of us gather, latecomers drawn by the screams of the early adopters, until we can flip them right off their pedestals, or whatever? Who knows, the details aren’t the point, it just felt resolute and ultimately optimistic at the time.

Lately, well, less so. Because now it’s the screams of the injured and dying, which the powerful can tune out through headphones, earplugs, or straightforward indifference. To put it another way, “we won’t stop screaming” doesn’t sound like a choice anymore, it sounds more like there’s an implied ‘because we can’t’ afterward. Infinite scream, the angel of history croaking hoarsely through cracked lips - oh for a time when staying alive won’t mean coming up screaming. That’s all partly to say that the echoes of these horrors inflect how art encountered before lands now - being different now, I suppose we can only have differences or be different in our relationships with art and with ourselves via art. I’m not sure about this but I’m inclined to think music is especially apt for getting at, and living with, all this stuff. I hear those songs now as I am now, but I also hear overtones, echoes bringing squeals of feedback, from how I heard them before, and in that hearing I hear or partially re-inhabit that earlier me as well, for better and for worse.

Final thought: thinking about “so lonely” and Stan Weir, I wondered, what’s the opposite of loneliness? Is it community? Is it freely associated work? I dunno and don’t have time to figure it out, I gotta get to sleep so I can back to the nonstop hamster wheel of waking up and fucking up, stupid week after stupid week.