This song has given me the chills every time I've listened to it. For your perusal, here are the lyrics, which appear to be written by a clinically depressed, lovestruck 20-something who thinks most things are "amazing" when she is not crying and listening to the soundtrack to "Purple Rain:" "2 HANDS 2 HOLD U DOWN )) yrs + mine )) life is amazin )) yr amazin
2 HANDS )) ive got U now )) dont u ever die )) life is amazin )) yr amazin
werent we sad from tha start?
black earth runs inside my heart
runs deep inside U
run in2 tha flame"
This song is scary because it evokes what I feel when I am starting to fall in love with someone; that feeling of hope that you will be happy, of desire for someone whose flaws you can't see, that fear of fucking everything up and losing someone whom you'd never want to lose, and of losing your hopes and joy and desire along with them. I know that the song is sexy and provocative, but I can't help but feel its coldness, too. I think that the songwriters very deliberately juxtaposed rather romantic, sexy lyrics, with alienating, alienated music -- fuzzed-out synths, distorted bass and vocals, and a vocal track that sounds so distant from the rest of the song -- to create tension and discomfort. However, I wonder if it isn't true that a lot of other love songs deal in fear, anxiety, and desperation anyway, even ones that aren't trying to create an uncomfortable ambiance. I am thinking of Motown songs in particular, for some reason. "Baby, I need your loving. Got to have all your loving." "Stop, in the name of love, before you break my heart." "Why do you build me up, buttercup, just to let me down?" Love is a place where we make ourselves fragile, where the vulnerability of even the most brutish individual is revealed. Love is a mental and emotional mode of joy and reassurance, but it is also often one that invites rampant insecurity. Love is scary.
I am pretty easily scared, though, to be fair. Those of you who know me know that I've had severe problems with depression and anxiety since I was a child. I was diagnosed with bipolar illness at age 13, but I'm not lucky enough to be someone who gets hypomania or mania. I have had five manic episodes in my life and countless depressions. These days, I am not depressed much anymore, except for when it's dark outside a lot (thanks, Seasonal Affective Disorder. SAD, ha ha!) or I have things in my life making me sad, like losses, because I take medications, exercise, and go to therapy. But I am afraid that I was not always an easy person to know, especially in my teens. While I am not as prone to depression as I was then, or as anxious, I can still get very anxious around certain types of new challenges. Those of you who don't know me can imagine what it must be like to know someone who has these problems, who is always a bit more nervous and jumpy than other people over something simple like taking an exam, driving to a new place for the first time, or going to a party and meeting new people. Or someone who sometimes looks physically weighed down with concerns, or whose blank face makes them stand out of a room of people with dynamic, laughing smiles and animated, sparkling eyes, a person who cries if a certain song comes on the radio. You can imagine that this complicates love for people like me at least as much as it complicates simpler things.
As song this song shows, falling in love (or just a good day) can let you sort of forget or conceal your disposition toward nervousness; life can be amazing. People like me don't always show the world how nervous we are. We disguise our nervousness in normalcy, just as this song disguises it with the format of a song about love and sex. We smile brightly and tell jokes to compensate, tell everyone what we're happy about, insist that we never should have had that last cup of coffee. However, what you don't get to see is the worst of our anxiety, because when it's at its worst, we are hiding and not showing anything of ourselves to anyone else. Avoidant behavior characterizes anxiety as much as feeling worried does. Isolating yourself, not talking to friends and other people who love you, procrastinating, and leaving places when you're uncomfortable are the most common "negative symptoms" that characterize anxiety disorder. (In the lingo of psychiatry, negative symptoms represent the stuff that people with psychiatric disorders stop doing. These are usually things that most healthy and functional people do to have a relatively normal life, such as eating, sleeping, working, going out, bathing, etc. Positive symptoms are things like feeling worried, feeling depressed, auditory hallucinations, delusions, feeling the urge to do, then doing compulsive behaviors like checking or counting, etc.) Perhaps you think it's weird that I think this song is about anxiety and you didn't notice that on first listen. However, for me, the negative symptoms of my anxiety are always the ones that I believe go unnoticed, because they are an absence of action rather than me doing something weird that will be noticed. Believing that no one sees my anguish both comforts me, because it allows me to think I'm passing as a normal person, yet it also alienates me, because I think that my invisible unhappiness can never be acknowledged and understood by another person. I do the same thing with my depression. I will hide it from everyone if I can, because I am ashamed that I can't just shake it and be free of its affliction. For me, the people I love are sometimes the ones from whom I most wish to conceal my anxiety and depression, because I don't wish to burden them or make them worry about me. However, I usually end up telling them, because I trust them and don't want to hide anything from them. I try to allow myself to be vulnerable.
This song's vulnerability is arresting. The gauzy, somewhat hollow-sounding, half-whispered words "you're amazing" are like what you'd say while half-asleep in your lover's arms. "Don't you ever die" is a plea for the ephemeral, formless feeling of perfect love to reify itself and become something substantial that we can keep in our grasp. It is a wistful wish for a moment to crystallize, arrest itself, become an insect trapped in a drop of solidifying amber, a gem to slip into our pocket. The vocals in the background, slowed down to an unearthly timbre and drawl, sound like a woman crying; they repeat the plea like La Llorona, a weeping ghost calling a soul back to life and love rather than to the realm of death. Please, don't make me lose you. Please, don't let me fuck this up. I'm still sad sometimes, but I've got you, and you're amazing. You are helping me forget how sad I am, and I'm so nervous and scared that you will leave me because I did something wrong, and then I'll be sad because you're gone, and because I'm alone again. This song is confrontational, in a way, because it allows fear and anxiety to enter the conversation, but not to suck all the air from the room and extinguish the flame. It is not an avoidant song, even though it deals with anxiety in its bleak, brittle soundscape and by pleading "don't you ever die."
This could be me projecting my own tendency to become anxious about fucking up good things when I've got them, of course. We all bring our own subjectivity to every task, including interpreting music and texts. This song is vulnerable, but is it as scared/scary as it sounds to me? I am perfectly aware that I have fucked up good things in the past, and that this song could have been sung to me, and it scares me that I was so inwardly focused and selfish in my depression and anxiety that my friends, lovers, and family members would think to me, "Don't die. Please, don't die." I left my half-conscious body for my parents to find after overdosing on medicines. I tried this two weeks before my best friend and I were going to see Sepultura, but mainly thought better of it because it would suck to die without seeing Sepultura with my best friend, so I claimed I'd made a mistake so I could be sent home. We went to the concert, then a week later, I did it again. I didn't think of how upsetting this would have been for my best friend, or my parents, or for other friends and family, or for the school nurse who had to help me call 911 the first time. I didn't imagine how my father, who found his father's body after his suicide in 1971, might have been anguished by my inability to hang on to my life in the face of depression, anxiety, severe bullying at school, and the other, more usual problems of being an immature teenager (keep in mind that I was skipped two years in school, and so was a 12-year-old child facing the older-kid drama of high school during my freshman year).
I couldn't have told you that life was amazing when I was 15. I never made a real and consistent secret of my suicidal depression and paralyzing anxiety to the people closest to me, blithely unaware of how this probably terrified them because they knew I had not been afraid to try to end my life before. It scares and saddens me that I was so blind as a teenager not to understand how I was not only hurting myself. It scares me to think I simply tried to avoid my life without understanding what losing me would mean to the people I loved, to know how they'd have tried to hang on to my hand and beg me not to die, if I'd not hidden myself and my agony from them, afraid to burden them, until I couldn't handle it by myself anymore.
Yes, I'm not suicidal anymore. Life is pretty amazing. I deal with my sadness in part with music, by letting others sing my terror out for me, and by writing about what's on my mind rather than stuffing it down. I haven't made a suicide attempt or been in a psychiatric hospital since I was 17. But I'm still sad and nervous. I'm also afraid that anyone who knows that, who knows what I did, will automatically not love me. To me, the most terrifying part of love is not only allowing myself to be vulnerable and to trust a new person, but to "run into the flame" -- to put aside my fears, and go ahead and try to love and be loved. I doubt sometimes that I am good enough to love and be loved. After all, my awareness of every mistake I ever made in previous relationships haunts me. The egregious things I did as a suicidally depressed teenager, acting as though not even the purest love from the kindest and most devoted people could retain me from exiting my then-miserable existence... well, those things appall me now if I think about them for a while. I worry that even if "I've got (someone) now," I am really just still the person who made those mistakes, even if I don't make the same kind of mistakes, or on the same scale. It scares me to think that no matter how much I love someone, I am going to make some kind of mistake, because people do that. I will be too involved with my work. I will forget something he asks me to do. I will be too nervous and that will be off-putting. People tend to make mistakes from time to time, but I fear that I will make a more serious mistake that will hurt someone or disgust someone. I fear that they will not forgive me, and that they will disappear. I am scared to simply trust that someone who loves me will forgive me, and I'm scared to run into the flame holding their hand. I have been sad from the start and now I have to believe that someone could forgive me for my sadness and tendency to be human. That is easier said than done. This song makes it sound easy if you just look at the words, but the way it sounds sad and cold betrays insecurity and the fear of letting go and trusting.
Well, sorry, everyone. I hope that everyone I hurt before has forgiven me by now. I'm really not that scary these days, anyway. However, this song reminds me that the kernel of terror nestled in the black earth of my heart, that germ of unquiet doubt longing to push out a stem toward the sun, still lives within me. It reminds me that to be happy, I must somehow acknowledge it while not letting it beleaguer me with its incessant whirl of anxiety. I must not allow myself to avoid my chance to be happy. This song calls forth my greatest fears, actually. I'm scared of fucking up good things that make me happy. But generally, I am happy. I just can hear the unhappiness and happiness within this song because I feel both. That duality is also scary. I really hope that you aren't as scared by this song as I am. I think that White Ring made a masterful album, but I hope they are happier people than their music would lead you to believe.
What could possibly be more terrifying than losing control of your mind, and knowing you had... and know that you couldn't ever get it back? From all accounts, Wesley Willis was a friendly and genteel soul who relied extensively on music -- creating it, listening to it, talking about, writing songs about other bands and songs -- to ease his often-derailed, aggravated mind. My friend Galen attests that Wesley, who enjoyed pancakes a lot, was the nicest guy you could imagine. My meeting with Wesley involved him refusing to let me buy him a soda until I'd said "rock," then "roll," then headbutted him. This happened nine times. Do you see that bump in his forehead? It feels like the stone inside of a peach. Imagine a peach pit crushing itself into your forehead with great force, your skull grinding against another human's. This hurts a lot. But this was a pretty rock 'n' roll salutation, and I endured this for Wesley, who ended up getting frustrated near the end of his set, leading to him swearing and yelling at his audience. There was no visible provocation for his outburst, but it is pretty clear that what was going on inside his head was tormenting him all evening. He seemed a bit dour even when greeting me, his brief smile flashing through the cast of worry and fear making his face at the moment I told him that I hoped he'd play some of my favorite songs. I named each of them. His grin widened, then fell, and then he mustered, gravely, "Say 'rock.' Now say 'roll.' Now head-butt me. Do it again."
Wesley's songs are known for their outlandish storytelling -- whupping Batman's ass, breaking out strangers' windshields, being best friends with musicians he's never met -- but can also tell very sincerely heartrending stories about life with a chronic mental illness. This song lays it bare: he can't escape the voices, they mock him and call him names, and he "start(s) raving" in public places, embarrassing himself, unable to hear his music above the chattering calumnious din of abusive voices in his own mind. This song and "Outburst" offer a painful glimpse into the life of a man not only ill, but pained by his symptoms and his awareness of how he seems to others. I have to wonder how it was for him to have smirking hipsters come up to him at shows, giggling about his songs. Say what you will about Wesley Willis's musical talent, but every song was him putting a piece of himself into the world, opening a window into his life for us to peer through. Some of us laugh at what we observe, but he was quite courageous for letting us see. My friends, what I see in these sadder songs scares me quite a bit. I can't imagine what he must have gone through, even with his matter-of-face recounting of his symptoms. This is, I suppose, because he eliminates any description of his emotions around knowing that he was ill. Perhaps those would have been too painful for him to make into art, even if he could have done so. Maybe he did write songs about how he felt about his illness, but chose not to share them with the world. I feel, though, that an empathetic listener can easily imagine the fear, hurt, and alienation he must have experienced during his most lucid moments. Imagining how that must have felt, dear reader, is more terrifying to me than imagining anything like vampires or zombies, possibly because I think those things cannot happen, but this could happen to any of us.
I considered Public Enemy/Antrax but it lost points for single-handedly inventing rap metal. I also considered Dylan/Cash, but Bob Dylan is Jack's lane. 90's one-hit-wonders are more my thing. On that logic, what can be better than a collaboration between two 90's one-hit-wonder artists? Plus, these were very well respected one-hit wonder bands. This is not a collaboration between Len and Marcy Playground (though if such a song existed, I would certainly dig it). This was the first song on a soundtrack that everybody owned to a movie that nobody saw. Awesome.
I have a truly soft spot for this collaboration between the Tiger Lillies and Leningrad. This is the title track off of the album, which consists of many Tiger Lillies songs translated into Russian and performed in a ribald and burlesque fashion by Leningrad (which is typical for Leningrad, of course), with the overseeing influence of the Tiger Lillies, except for two songs which are the reverse. While I like the Tiger Lillies, there is something about listening to them for long periods of time that makes me a bit nuts... this is probably due to Martyn Jacques' shrill voice, rather than anything about the music itself. I do like how bitter and hateful their lyrics are, though, and this song (which is "Crap" in English) echoes my own sentiments about popular media fairly well: "there's crap on the records, there's crap on CD, it's got to be crap, it's an industry. this crap makes me angry, this crap makes me sad, cause this crap, yes this crap, yes this crap is so bad.
yes, this crap, this crap, crap, crap... (etc.)
crap on the television, crap on TV, it's got to be crap, it's an industry. well this crap is a sickness, this crap's a disease, this crap rots our brains and brings us to our knees."
Something about changing the linguistic code to Russian but not changing the lyrics substantially is pretty delightful, too. Russian pop music has always been pretty far behind Western music; in much of Eastern Europe, the pop music of the 90's and even the 80's is still much beloved. Russian rock music, developed in isolation from Western music for so long, is actually a pretty interested proposition, as it tends to include lyrics themes and even music motifs that are typically Russian, a sort of in-joke that outsiders might not enjoy without further study and decoding. Leningrad is a great example of rock music that is a pastiche of East and West, and includes many jokes and strong language that Russians, and maybe not many other people, would understand. (Actually, they aren't always understood at home; the group has been banned from plaing in several cities before, including their hometown of St. Petersburg.) However, Russian pop music and TV are both pretty godawful, and tend toward pretty blatant sexism and objectification of women, political extremism, banality, and other things that aren't enjoyable to many consumers.
This song has always struck me as a great consumer's complaint; now that Russia has joined the capitalist world, they are well overdue for their own chance to find the product offered to them unsatisfactory, though doing it using a cultural idiom borrowed from Western culture is both strangely inappropriate (not that satirical songs haven't existed in Russian history, but actually translating and covering a British band's song directly?? This seems a little bit "foreign," still) yet perfectly appropriate in a historical sense (using the Western band's song and medium of choice for critiquing their own media, a media whose influences also come from the West; Russian media is now, of course, a privatized product, using the production, editing and semiotics of the West, etc.) Again, a great intersection of East and West can be found in Russian popular music, but this song makes that intersection a little more blatant in several ways.
You asked for it. I don't know a lot about John Zorn, other than that 1) he rules, 2) he is quite prolific, and 3) he does albums of Judaica (of his own special brand, sometimes, but yes), and that I laughed at a friend who hails from a distant land once because he exclaimed incredulously, "John Zorn is JEWISH?!?!?!?" (Granted, this was the same friend who had somehow given me a similar spit-take with "Leonard Cohen is JEWISH???" not long before, so please forgive my rudeness.) The John Zorn incident led to me verbally making a list of awesome musicians who are Jewish (Chuck Schuldiner was near the top) while laughing uproariously. Anyway, I am having a terrible week, so I appreciate this assignment... it has led me to believe that my miserable heart may be soothed by a balm of Naked City albums. Eh, it's worth a shot.
