“Stop Wasting Your Whole Life/Messed Up and Down” – Gold

Musically, this song is most like Silver of any of the songs on this album. Which means I don’t have a lot to say about it. It has moments of aggression, it has moments of wallowing in sadness, then, strangely, it switches to a major key and has vocal harmonies. JM was trying to fit a lot into this song but the changes are subtle and can be easy to miss.

Let’s talk about this song title. For a man who must think brevity is the soul of lyric writing, this is a long song title for JM. This is almost approaching the song title length of your average Sufjan Stevens ditty. Again, it’s like he is packing a lot in here but it is not clear at first glance what the distinctions are and why so many words are needed to express this. For a writer who loves the economy of words, this seems significant.

As for the story the lyrics tell, at first glance it appears to be another song about the singer turning away from or leaving an unhealthy situation, or, more specifically, an unhealthy person. This is a person who is wasting his life and is messed up to bilateral proportions. However, there are two lines that stood out to me today that make me think there is more going on in this song:

I’m leaving tonight, I’m leaving tonight
Instead of wasting your whole life

These two lines together show that the singer thinks he is a cause for the unhealthy person to waste their life. The wasting of life is not independent of the singer. The singer is a part of the dynamic and he is leaving to force a break in the pattern.

This is some powerful stuff. Let’s unpack this some more. If you have ever known a toxic person, you know how they hold on to their bitter grievances about those who have, in their view, done them wrong. They hold it as dear as the air they breathe and it is nearly as essential for them. It is essential because it is at the foundation of their own self-concept.

Toxic people are generally people who are incapable of achieving or living out their own autonomy. They tend to see themselves as failures even if they do not admit this openly (in fact, the face that they present to the world will most likely be rattling off all their achievements and skills in an attempt to keep anyone from realizing the substantial self-hatred that they have). They cannot except that the failures might have something to do with them so there has to be external reasons for why they fail. This is why they need people to blame. All the perceived grievances and perpetual blame that they repeat over and over in their heads is what poisons them; it is what makes them toxic.

If you are a person in relationship with a toxic person, whether it is romantic, platonic or familial, you will become a source of grievance eventually. Once this happens, the toxic person will come back to it over and over like a dog that eats its own shit just to vomit it up and then eat the vomit. Once you get enough discernment to see that this is a pattern and no amount of defending yourself would ever be sufficient to address the grievance, you have to decide what you will do.

If you stay in the situation, either to defend yourself or to try to heal the breach with the toxic person, the toxic person will draw your energy out of you perpetually to keep this cycle going. Ever tried debating a narcissist? It is an exercise in futility. Ultimately, they only way you can help yourself or the toxic person is to withdraw your energy from the situation. It frees you to move towards your own growth and it frees the toxic person to find a way to break their pattern or, at the very least, find another person who wants to play that role in their life. Withdrawing your energy from the situation is really an act of kindness and grace. Maybe that’s why this song ends in harmonies and a major key.

This is a more nuanced story than just the surface reading of the singer turning away from an unhealthy person. Much like the structure of the musical components of the song, there are different things going on here that can be easily missed without discernment. If you find yourself stuck in this pattern with someone, I pray that you can find discernment and I hope that you can find a way to leave it. Leaving it tonight would be best.

“You’re Mean” – Gold

Now I love the first three songs on Gold, but, honestly, when the album starts I’m really just waiting for “You’re Mean” to play. The pop hooks on this thing, the layered guitars, all of it just sends a dopamine rush to my head. This was the first song that really showed JM’s love of New Wave and I loves me some New Wave. It was also a sign of things to come with JM’s stylistic changes in the future. And I was hooked and ready for the things which had not yet come to pass. And maybe that is the mark of a near perfect song.

It’s a strange thing to find something to write about a song everyday. Even with a band you love, you are going to run into songs that just measure up to “meh” on your internal meter. Still though, you have to find something to write about. When a “meh” song is what is queued for the day, I find that these tend to be my longer posts. I put more of my own story in to fill the gaps, I suppose. Now faced with a song that I love beyond all measure, I don’t have a lot to say. I could talk about the lyrics. Lord knows I’ve known mean people and I’ve been mean myself but I just can’t focus on those stories with all these feel good vibes pounding in my ears.

I actually tried to construct a story to tell for this song which involved me doing an automatic grocery pickup. Have you done those things yet where you make your order online and all you have to do is show up at the store and they put all your shit in the car for you? I love it, particularly as it relates to Wal-Mart because 1) walking through Wal-Mart strains my introvert soul and 2) I know Wal-Mart will actually have to keep employees to fill these orders.

The downside to this is substitutions for items they don’t have in stock. And what are the items that they never seem to have in stock, you may ask? Just what every gay girl needs: iced coffee and cat litter deodorizer. These things are constantly out of stock. Knowing this and knowing that “You’re Mean” was my song for the day, I set up a grocery order. My thinking was that when they showed up to my car door to tell me that they had no iced coffee or cat litter deodorizer, I could respond in song with:

You’re mean
So it seems
You’ve got everything
But the one I need

I could then report the results in my post. But dammit, I had a perfect order. No substitutions. The one time I needed them to fail me, they came through. Bastards. They’re mean.

“When You Feel Miserable” – Gold

I love the guitar riffs in this song. They have this sort of inevitable feel to them that just pulls you along. Sometimes smooth, sometimes gritty, they show the complexity of a relationship where not all is as it seems to be.

This songs makes me remember such a relationship. I once took a walk with a sweet girl, so sweet, I knew it was true. Except when it wasn’t true. Despite everything that seemed on paper to be a perfect pairing, something was missing at the core. I knew it in my gut right away but I tamped down my intuition so that I could continue to believe that what was ultimately illusion was real, true and would stay with me.

Of course, it all eventually fell apart. I was as invisible to her as she was to me. Left in the rubble, I had to decide what I was going to do. Was I going to continue to chase after a mirage? Was I going to find a new person or a new thing to distract me? Was I going to apply my considerable brain power and energy into fixing what was broken? These are my usual patterns. Keep my hands busy and my brain occupied at all costs.

I did something different this time. I accepted my pain. Instead of trying to explain it away or fix it, I just let it be. I let the pain of so many situations, not just the broken relationship but ancient childhood pains, be acknowledged and accepted. The pain moved through my body and was released. Paradoxically, allowing the pain to be was when I stopped feeling miserable.

We can put so much energy into avoiding accepting what has happened in the past and the pain that comes with that reality that there is scarcely any energy left for living. We fear looking at the pain like it is the Medusa living in a darkened cave; should we lay our eyes upon it, it might turn us to stone. I’ve spent years being miserable just to avoid accepting the very real pain in my heart and the situations that caused that pain. Once I accepted it and allowed it to be, it was done and over with in a matter of minutes. It was the most significant pivot point in the history of my life.

So when you feel miserable, try accepting your pain and allow it to move through you. Stop resisting it. Stop trying to run from it or distract yourself from it with things or people. Stop trying to fix it. Just let it be.

“Duel Overhead Cam” – Gold

“Duel Overhead Cam” is the first song on Gold which demonstrates the reason why this album is a step up from Silver – nuance. Those palm muted rhythm chords right in sync with the bass drive the song forward with a swagger that nothing on Silver can touch. “Nuanced” is perhaps not a description you would expect of a song that has a screeching guitar that can drill right through your head just before the song’s cathartic release, but compared to the monotony of Silver, it is nuanced.

I’ve been debating on whether the lyrics are about a motorcycle or about boobs. I’m tempted to make the song about boobs as I have more hands on experience with them (See what I did there? heehee, yeah, I thought you would like that). But we will go with it being a love song to an engine. I did some research on DOHC systems in preparation of writing this. In addition to being a coal miner’s daughter, I am a also a mechanic’s daughter (my dad is a redneck Renaissance man). I’m not completely unversed in such things. Turns out DHOC systems were used on Triumph cycles up until the 80’s. Well, there you go.

When he sings “she’s got a hold on me”, I can feel that motorcycle holding me on a deep curve. DHOC engines allowed for faster speeds, more efficiency and higher power output. The downside is that they require more maintenance and have to be re-timed on occasion. But aren’t the DHOC pro’s and con’s true of any relationship that’s worth having?

“A Housewife Love Song” – Gold

This song is radical for something that came out of the Christian music scene in the mid ’90s. Hell, it’s still radical. I had never heard a Christian artist (and scarcely any Christians at all) question the expectation that the wife’s role was to serve the household. I’d never heard anyone point out the exploitation of that paradigm (tend the tables for free and it’s okay).

No one in my rural Kentucky, Southern Baptist upbringing questioned this paradigm. I remember when I was young, my mom taught me how to skin rabbits and cook them (my dad was a hunter). I asked why I had to know how to skin rabbits and she told me that someday I would have a husband and I would have to do these things for him (plot twist: I didn’t get a husband and have lived a life free of rabbit skinning). She didn’t even question it and she was a woman living in this paradigm and did not question it when she passed those expectations onto me.

But this Christian boy from California questioned it and that confirmed my suspicions that I was right to question it too. What my mom thought was a teenage rebellious streak in her daughter that would eventually even out when I found a man and had kids has become a way of being. I broom the rats out for no man; they can deal with their own rats as I deal with my own.

The music video captures this ’50s era ideal home setting with the wife bustling around the kitchen while the husband sits in quiet expectation to be served. The video begins with a closeup shot of a hand towel that says “Ever True”. But are they true to each other?

True to its ’50’s era imagery, the video is impressive with its Freudian snapshots. We see the wife chopping unwashed, unpeeled carrots. The wife replaces the burnout light bulb and restores the light even though the husband is sitting underneath it and could have done it. She aggressively shucks corn and breaks eggs as the husband watches home videos of children. There is already an undercurrent of violence even while the perfect household imagery persists. The wife shaves the husband in an act that is both intimate and potentially dangerous; what if the razor cuts too deep?

Then a rat shows up walking across the couch. She has not broomed the rats out for the man as the lyrics command her. “Broom the rats out” is such a strange lyric. It reminds me of the Robert Johnson line “I believe I’ll dust my broom” which was code for leaving an oppressive situation. Maybe instead of brooming the rats out, she will be dusting her broom.

We see images of her in a black dress with Medusa-like hair. Shots of her raging in her black dress are interspersed with shots of her in the kitchen with her Donna Reed attire. The husband sits alone watching a cartoons with a character wearing a hat that at first looks like a flaccid penis that suddenly becomes erect (ok dude, I get that this is your kink already….).

Is she dressed in black because she is bringing death like the Reaper? Perhaps it is the death of the illusion of the perfect, stereotypical home. The husband returns to the table where she, wearing her black dress now, is serving the meal she has prepared. Even the food is Freudian. We have a circle of deviled eggs, meat topped with pineapple rings with a side of short, stubby corn on the cob. You think she’s trying to tell him something about her unfulfillment? I mean, she did have to change her own light bulb after all.

She wraps the food and the husband up in that red Saran Wrap that was such a thing back in the mid ’90s. The rats come out to nibble at the food and the man. The wife’s not brooming the rats out anymore. She’s dusting her broom. She leaves the husband to his fate with his rats as she leaves alone in car in the middle of the night. If they couldn’t be ever true to each other, she can at least be ever true to herself.

She’s the Queen

I’m going to break my self-imposed protocol and cover an EP today. I’ve already touched on half of the songs on She’s the Queen in my write up for Silver. The rest of the songs on the EP cover the same ground as what we’ve already seen on Silver and I’m sure we are all ready to move on. The themes of the lyrics fall in line with what we have already seen but beyond pointing out that our dominant girl now has a title (she’s the “queen”), there’s not much else for me add here. But I could not skip She’s the Queen altogether as it has so much significance for me and remains one of my favorites. Plus, it’s been an excuse for me to listen to the EP all day in preparation and that is good enough for me.

She’s the Queen was the first sf59 album I got my hands on. Back in ’95, my mom took me on a day trip to Knoxville, TN. We would take this trip annually on the third weekend of April for the purposes of looking at all the dogwoods in bloom. While on this trek, we stopped at a Christian bookstore on Kingston Pike on the west end of the city. This place was made for the hardened traditional church crowd. It carried an assortment choir robes, packaged communion supplies and biblical tracts that looked like cheap Watchtower knockoffs, all ready to order in bulk. There was literally nothing to interest me while my mom was ruminating over some obscure book she was looking for.

To kill time I rummaged through a large cardboard box of clearance items filled mostly with accompaniment tapes ordered by some well-meaning choir soloist but never purchased. Amidst the tapes of “How Great Thou Art” and “Come Thou Fount”, I found She’s the Queen for $0.50. I was something I could actually afford with my budget at the time so I bought it and listened to it on my Walkman the rest of the day. Now this album always reminds me of springtime road trips.

It’s funny how you can find exactly what you need in the places you least expect it. I would likely never have bought a sf59 album at full price. I knew them from I Predict a Clone and liked them but not enough to spend $10 on them. Even if I did have a financial windfall that would have allowed me to purchase either Gold or Silver, if I had started it out with those albums it is unlikely that I would have continued to follow them because there wasn’t much variation in style on those albums. I would have gotten bored with it. I get restless if I stay with any particular musical genre too long.

She’s the Queen had so much variation in the ways the songs sounded. Since that was my first substantial entry into JM’s work, I was well-equipped for JM’s stylistic changes over the years. I knew that I could expect the unexpected with sf59 and that was enough for me to buy my way into the experience at full price from then on. She’s the Queen was exactly what I needed when I needed it and I got it all for $0.50 at a store that had absolutely nothing to interest me. That’s how the universe works sometimes, bitches, and thank God it does.

“The Dungeon” – Silver

After all this discussion about dominant/submissive relationship dynamics expressed in the lyrics of Silver, it is fitting that the last song should be called “The Dungeon”. Honestly y’all, I did not plan it out this way. I didn’t even realize that this was going to happen until I was looking at the Silver tracklist yesterday. I know that I said I wasn’t talking about BDSM when describing dom/sub relationship dynamics but I may have to rethink whether the singer intends this. I mean, if it is there, it’s there, right?

We are closing out this album with the place of the submissive boy’s torture. The rhythm guitars are tighter, the drums more punctuated, the lead guitar wails more so than on any other song on Silver. The way the song is constructed betrays a sort of fascination with the rhythm of aggression and it revels in pain.

We talked about how the girl intentionally tortures the boy to get him to reveal himself. The lyrics describe the way she tortures him. The first way has been mentioned several times in the previous songs; it is the other boy who gets all her attention and love. The second method of torture is her absence. She is described as being outside or always in the hallway. Our submissive boy is all trussed up in the dungeon and she doesn’t even bother to come into the dungeon and watch his suffering.

For the boy’s part in this, he waits for her and he is always ready to take the blame. The song ends with him repeating that it all will remain the same. And it will remain the same until someone breaks the dynamic. But for the time being, it remains as it is. Probably because, ultimately, they both like it that way.

And so we have one album down on this sf59 blog project. As I mentioned before, Silver is one of my least favorite sf59 albums. It’s not that there is anything flawed about the album. I got into She’s the Queen and Gold before I got into Silver. After hearing the majesty of Gold, Silver seemed like a step backwards. But I’ve come to a new appreciation of Silver after taking a deep dive into each song and contemplating the thematic intent. In some cases, I had no idea what the lyrics were to some of these songs until I spent the time to focus on it and write about it. It’s been a good experience for me. Thanks to all of you going on this ride with me! Everyday I look forward to your comments and hearing your thoughts and experiences with these songs.

“She Only Knows” – Silver

I confess that Silver is one of my least favorite sf59 albums. It hovers just above Talking Voice vs Singing Voice at the bottom of my list. I love this song though. This song and “Blue Collar Love” are the only ones on this album that get to live on another day by making onto a playlist or mixtape. I love how mellow it is and how the guitars are so interwoven. It is the peace in the storm of the rest of the album.

The song begins in a place of stalemate. The lovers are holding hands on the roadside. Obviously there are places to go because there is a road right there but they stay where they are because staying in place at least does not make the situation sadder.

This song too carries the theme of dominance and submission that permeate the songs on this album. Let’s unpack this and see what is underneath the words. To clarify, when I speak of the dominance/submission dynamic, I am not talking about BDSM. I pointing the more general psychological motivations for the roles that we may choose to play in a relationship. The dominance/submission dynamic tends to occur in relationships with people who are not whole. It is when you seek out another half person to fill the voids within you.

The songs we’ve looked at thus far describe the girl as being dominate and the boy as submitting to her demands. We’ve seen some explanation as to why the boy submits but this song is the first to give us a peek at the motivations for the girl to dominate. In Erich Fromm’s description of symbiotic unions, he describes the motivation of the sadist as an attempt to gain “secret knowledge” of the other. In short, she wants to know.

“There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret: it is that of complete power over another person; the power which makes him do what we want, think what we want; which transforms him into a thing, our thing, our possession. The ultimate degree of this attempt to know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to betray his secret in his suffering.” The Art of Loving, pg 27

She toys with him and tortures him as a cat tortures a mouse before it is killed. It is a game. She does this so that he will reveal all that is hidden within him, not because he chooses to do so willingly but because he sees no other option except to acquiesce in order to keep her attention which he desperately needs to distract him from the void within himself.

Because she has tortured him, he has revealed himself and she can control him. She knows and understands him better than he knows himself. She only knows.

But there is another side to this. The submissive has motivations too that are just as depraved. If she is the only one who knows the world, then she is the only one who can make decisions. She is the one who charts the course they both are on. He submits his will to her guidance and her demands. When it all falls apart and goes tits up (as it inevitably will) she will be the one left with the responsibility of the failure. It will all be her fault because she was the only one with the ability to choose and she chose wrongly. Of course, it is not actually true that she was the only one who could exert her will, but it is the reality for the masochist.

Fromm says, “The masochistic person does not have to make decisions, does not have to take any risks; he is never alone – but he is not independent; he has no integrity; he is not yet fully born.” Both the boy and the girl use each other as objects to escape their own isolation and anxiety. There is no sympathetic figure here.

“Happy Days are Here Again” – Silver

It’s this a cute, happy little tune? I believe it is even in a major key. Well, we can’t let that stand. Let’s see if we can make it a little more sinister.

A reoccurring theme on Silver is this girl who has and controls it all. The boy is at her mercy and tags along, waiting for those moments when she will give him whatever it is that he lacks. The title of the song implies that the happy days are gone when she is gone. Therefore, she controls his happiness and he submits to this domination.

There is a danger to placing your joy and your peace in another person. It may work out for awhile if you happen to pick someone who has good intentions, but it will eventually fall apart because relationships cannot be balanced with this dynamic. Really, making another person responsible for your happiness is too much to ask of anyone. It has its roots in the person’s depravity, not in their love.

The lyrics hint at this. Even though the happy days have returned with the girl, the boy is not happy because “cause when she smiles it shakes my sickest phase.” He knows something is sick here and he knows that sickness begins with him.

“Droned” – Silver and She’s the Queen

Much like my love of the Lounge version of “Monterey”, my favorite version of “Droned” is the In Love version. No hate for the Silver version; it just doesn’t pull at the strings of my heart in the same way.

I fell in love with the In Love version shortly after my 16th birthday. My parents bought me an acoustic guitar and a chord sheet and I set about teaching myself how to play in the most analog way possible. A week after my birthday, a severe snowstorm hit that kept us snowed in for 3 weeks and at least 2 of those weeks were without electricity. But I had my Walkman, plenty of batteries and my She’s the Queen cassette. I did not have a tuner for my guitar but I found the high e at a certain part in “Droned” and I would use it to tune off of. I also tried to figure out how to play the song by ear which just ended in disaster.

On those long, cold days, I would put on my headphones and just melt into the guitars and JM’s whispering and longing vocals. I imagined what it would be like to be in love, having not had the experience yet. I think this was the genesis point with my propensity to be in love with being in love. Turns out that this song is a horrible template to use for learning what being in love is like and it has taken me years to figure this out.

JM sings about how he knows when she’s faking it. I wish I had that kind of discernment but the evidence of past relationships shows that I do not. And there always seems to be a “he” who may or may not be away and who determines my place in the relationship. The “he” may not even be an actual person; it could just be whatever golden idol my partner is focused on at the time. I end up staying in these relationships longer than I should. Maybe it’s because I still believe that they are the best thing, easily. Maybe, like JM, I just don’t know how to let go.

If I think that love should be this way, I will draw people to me who will fulfill the role. So now I’m changing my idea of what I think love should be. We will see if it changes the kind of people who are drawn to me or who I am drawn to.