Weekly Reviews/Rantings on the Mountain Goats

[upthegoats]

You & Me & A High Balcony

I like minimalism, as an aesthetic. I imagine this is not surprising, since you probably need to appreciate a minimal soundscape to enjoy early Mountain Goats. Intricately produced acoustic wonder, it ain’t. That’s totally fine though, because some of us like that simplicity. We like paring things down to one man, one acoustic guitar, and one creaky boombox. Inside that space, which might seem so uncrowded as to be barren, we discover an unlikely infinity.

That same appetite for simplicity drives the narrator of this song. He starts by insisting on a “clean slate.” He talks about the lack of complications—“no good reasons left not to let down my guard.” He imagines isolation both physical and technological: “let’s pretend we’re all alone, let’s unplug the telephone.” And, in the end, he insists that it comes down to simple questions, to “you and me and a high balcony.” As if he can reduce the universe to three terms, as if he can separate himself from everything wrong. By shutting out as much of the world as possible, he can leave only what is good in the world. Past that balcony lies innumerable “but”s and “we can’t”s. Why not simply…ignore it?

The problem, of course, is that the world is not defined by what we choose to consider important, that the world goes on existing in all its chaos no matter how simple our viewpoint is. The narrator can’t escape this, and the complications of reality creep in with a steady determination. He immediately has to come up with alibis (“if a stranger should ask you…”), which goes to show that they can’t abandon the rest of the world, because even as he asserts that desire he has to plan for the interaction with that environment. The tasks he assigns to himself and to his companion are introduced with “just” as if they’re not a big deal (“just rehearse the alibis…”), but in truth they turn this simple existence free from unhappy compromise with the outside world into a carefully staged performance. There’s nothing natural or simple about it. Every strand of complexity that he’s cut in separating the two of them off is precisely replaced—or worse—by the new requirements that maintaining mental separation places on him. I mean, really. “Don’t blink, don’t try too hard not to”? It’s like the advice of “act natural.” All we do all the time is act natural. “Supernatural” isn’t really available to us. He think narrowing the world to a single room and a single other person will bring clarity, but that action introduces enough complexity to offset all his efforts. It reminds me, the physicist, of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. You can try to be tricky about how you move energy around, you can try to move heat from here to there, but there are very hard limits to how well you can do. Something is always lost, there are costs that cannot be shuffled away.

“Anhydrous and matches, why don’t we cook up two more batches?” There’s a line that changes things. If you don’t know, these are ingredients for making methamphetamine, and you want the matchbooks, not the boxes. (I believe this is a We Shall All Be Healed outtake.) So this is the sort of reality that’s outside of these people, always hovering in their peripheral. An addiction is a complicating factor, to put it mildly, and so they can’t free themselves by shutting out the outside world. The endeavor is doubly doomed: first, because they cannot really isolate themselves without inviting still more trouble, and second because their problems aren’t really external to them. They still have all the materials they need to craft their poison of choice. Even when all alone, their addiction is present, and ready to strike. It’s the sort of “why not?” logic that typifies destructive impulses, an erosion of the self-control faculty. This is what underlies persecution fantasies. We want to believe that all our ills can be blamed on the government, or our parents, or the scumbags of the world. And, of course, plenty of people are done in by these factors. But sometimes there are truths that will not budge. Sometimes it really is your fault.

With all these problems, their project begins to fall apart almost immediately. To quote a large fragment: “it’s going to come down to this: you, and me, and a high balcony and professional wrestling on pay-per-view. Windows and light and the radio blaring all night and the truth slowly dawning on me and then on you.” That’s a sentence that starts with the isolation, and gradually expands. First the balcony is included. Then there’s the television, with all the links to the great external world. Then windows, light, the noise of the radio—at this point these people aren’t really isolated anymore. Finally, the truth, the thing they ultimately hoped to escape. But they cannot wall themselves in, and even if they could the fatal mistakes have already been made, and they are stuck with them. In the end, no matter what you do or where you go, you are forced to live with who you are.

[upthegoats]

Surrounded

When did we start “having relationships” with technology? I mean, obviously at the very beginning people probably “had relationships” with their spears, but it was only in the last century I feel that technology really began to figure into our social lives. We listened to the news come in on radio, we set up televisions where our fireplaces used to be, we started carrying smartphones. At some point our machines became something that we felt in dialogue with. At some point “the media” emerged as a separate enterprise. And, the thing is, we welcomed the opportunity to retreat into them. At first I thought this song was anti-technology, and perhaps it is, but the narrator is certainly no Luddite. He doesn’t bemoan his state of technical envelopment. He welcomes it; he begs for it; he lets a harmonica slide along behind him as he insists that we leave him to this. No, we—and here I feel like I especially mean “Americans” when I say “we” but substitute your own country’s experience if you like—let this happen to ourselves. We liked it. We would rather be in one great big national dialogue than constantly subject ourselves to a thousand local ones. The dialogue with the television is easier, anyway. It talks to you, but it won’t listen back, so you are relieved of your duties towards it. To the television, you can be a receptacle. No human will give you such consideration.

That isn’t enough for the narrator of this song, however. He talks about finding a blank channel, letting the static fill the room. That’s an avoidance not just of the abstracted communication that is media consumption, but an avoidance even of that. He doesn’t want to hear a news anchor drone on about Syria, or see some chef who’s apparently famous create a meal he won’t get to eat. He just wants static—even spectrum white noise with a nice broad Fourier transform. It’s an interesting fact that, on an old television that displays analog “snow,” some small fraction of what you see is the microwave background radiation, slowly-cooling photons left over from just after the Big Bang. Everything else you hear is incidental, the electromagnetic equivalent of the wind in the trees. Maybe some of it is a passing solar flare, or a plane passing overhead. It’s noise that you can’t hear. Maybe to the narrator, it’s the closest he can get to ocean waves in Colorado.

A machine is automation. The narrator talks about desiring to fall through his own roof, as if he can simply land there. I don’t know whether or not this is a word in common psychological usage, but the phrase that comes to mind is “choice fatigue.” So much life to live, so much to do. Pay bills, love your friends, listen to the news. It’s too much. It is easier for him, and he would prefer it, if he could self-exile, banish himself from society. Use the weather he’s been given to isolate himself entirely, find a blank station, and let the many modern modes of automation wash over him. Let the television (“ninety-six inch”) cover his field of vision and nullify all other reality, let him replace any informational content in that signal with white noise, and let himself be blank in the face of a modern infrastructure incredibly larger than himself.

There are sociological machines, too, and they aren’t made of silicon or aluminum. They’re made of teachers, social workers, executives, congressman. They move and bustle about and work in utterly predictable ways to perform a chosen function in the optimal fashion. Nobody tends to like them very much. Think of how many advertisements you’ve seen from banks claiming to treat you as “more than just a number.” Of course, not one of those advertisements changes the fact that you are a number in the banking system. That’s what it means for there to be a “system.” There is something inhuman about a corporation or a government, a set of rules and behaviors that transcends any one person. When a corporation does something wrong, who do you blame? The executives who guided it, the stockholders who motivated it, the employees that enacted its will? There’s nobody there, only the cold clanging of logic against itself. It can be beautiful—there are few things I appreciate as much as being able to put an Amazon order in and have it arrive the next day—but it is certainly inhuman. At some level, it might even seem divine. Consider the Catholic Church, especially in pre-Reformation Europe. A single trans-national organization, devoted to higher powers and proceeding according to doctrines and writings supposedly inaccessible and unalterable by its members, ultimately only judged by God. That’s a machine for you, performing its tasks with ruthless efficiency.

Perhaps that’s what this narrator finds in machines. Efficiency, devotion, a strange form of loyalty almost. He’d rather spend his final days surrounded by these machines, who cannot possibly let him down, then invite into his life the reckless souls of his fellow humans. He is aware of what he is turning away from, “the world and all its wonders,” but he is still turning away from it. That makes it at least a somewhat admirable decision. Plenty of people simply miss the world in favor of the great wash of the artificial, so for him to recognize it and still turn away—well, at least he’s conscious, however much we might not agree with him. And rather than substitute his lack of human contact for the false contact of the television, he finds a dead station and commits to it. There it is: glorious black and white, something pure and otherworldly. Somewhere in there is the history of the whole universe; somewhere in there might be some last desperate whisperings from God.

[upthegoats]

have you/will you talk about peacocks?

This blog started as a project of going through all the studio albums, so yes I have, sort of. When I was doing the albums it was a lot more writing all at once, and I would sometimes get to a song I didn't have a clear viewpoint on and just sort of skim over it. You'll see that that's what happened with "Peacocks" and there isn't much there I'm afraid. Nowadays, focusing on one single sort of forces me to say something substantial. (Of course, selection bias is in operation here.)

I have in the past thought about redoing some of the albums, since especially pre-AHWT the writing I did was laughably thin in comparison to how I was writing by the end of the project. At the moment, however, there are no plans to start that systematically.

[upthegoats]

Not really a question, but in your "Steal Smoked Fish" rant-review-thingy, you refer to Burnside's Bridge being in Maryland, and therefore ruling out the song being directly autobiographical. I believe he is talking about the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon, a city that I'm sure you know John's connection to. Thought you ought to know.

I think this is from a long time ago and somehow I missed it in the inbox, but I always strive to publish corrections where I fudge the facts.

[upthegoats]

Suggestion: in the Transcendental Youth review, you did Cry For Judas, and you said you didn't want to talk about the music video. Could you perhaps do a review where you only talk about that video? It's pretty cryptic, and I don't think you'd be short of stuff to say.

Hmm. I'll think about it, I've been giving Transcendental Youth some relistens lately, so I might be in the right mindset. No promises, though. More than one song has gotten targeted and had a day of obsessive listening and I just found I couldn't get the kind of writing out of it that I wanted.

[upthegoats]

Hey~ Speaking of Narakaloka, I was with you right up until your last line. To me, someone who remarks on the beauty/deepness of their cabbages and the stars outside and who says "but that's alright" to their friend/love ignoring a final sign of them being on the earth instead of saying something like "you may not hear them after all you INCONSIDERATE FUCK", is someone showing remarkable inner-peace, not torment, even through their loneliness. Still, it's a beautiful song.

This is a good point, and I actually agree. I think in my attempt to analyze the "hell" connection I may have overreached here. I actually started out intending to emphasize his acceptance of what's to come, but I think I let another strain of interpretation maybe assert itself a bit too much in the writing process. Considering the emphasis Eastern religions place on enlightenment/inner peace, it's quite possible we're supposed to read that "but that's alright" as a triumph of non-attachment and acceptance.

[upthegoats]

Narakaloka

I’m starting to realize a bit more that John Darnielle really used to love his crucial lines. Sometimes they came immediately—see my review for “Star Dusting”—but in this week’s song it’s nearly the end before you know what’s going on. Like a movie with a perception-altering twist, songs with this device demand a second listen. I feel that later songs focus more on characters, giving more straightforward narratives. There are certainly counter-examples, and the fact that throughout my analyses you’ll find “and then I got to the line that says…” speaks to that. But usually later songs seem to either be fleshing out a character or telling a narrative, rather than a song like this, which doesn’t really begin until the line about the doctor. Until that line arrives, it’s impossible to give any proper opinions about what the song’s about. It’s about a reunion, sure, and some guy preparing for his girlfriend coming home or whatever, that much is clear. But as a simple, straightforward narrative it lacks nearly all the kick of what’s actually going on here, which is that the narrator will die within a month. The song before you know this twist and the song after you know this twist are two different songs entirely, and can barely be compared. If you excise the line about the death-dealing physician or whatever, what would I write about that circumcised version of Narakaloka? I guess I’d say maybe it was about the hope that this man had that he could impress somebody, that perhaps in reality she was beyond being impressed, or that her degree of impressedness (shut up) wasn’t even the issue. But honestly that’s me inserting extratextual sadness because I’m not going to review a Mountain Goats song and conclude “yeah, that was sweet and simple. It IS nice to make pancakes for bae.” I’d just go on to one of the other songs on New Asian Cinema, all of which are fantastic, shout out to crazy obscure EPs.

Nah, Mountain Goats songs are always stories, and if they’re any good, that means there’s a conflict. In this case, it’s the one from earlier, with Death. (By “from earlier” I don’t mean “in an earlier review.” I mean like, earlier today, for all of us.) Here is a man who knows he’s facing death, yet is intent on growing cabbages. Why do that? He won’t be around to eat them. He’s only just now “set the table for two” suggesting that he is nearly always alone, such that it is a special occasion for him to set the table for another person. Here is a man with a very short lifespan, and the tragedy of it is that he is facing it alone. Maybe he can draw hope from the subject of the song, maybe he intends to live on in her memory. However, the song frequently hints that they may never see each other again. JD says “if you walk by at night” rather than “when,” a mistake I noticed when I typed the wrong one in my own transcription. So that’s already conditional. And, more pointedly, he says “you may not see them after all, but that’s alright.” He’s resigned to the fact that the person he does all these things for is simply not guaranteed to show up.

We don’t know what sort of message this song is—is he writing a letter? An email? Or is it diegetic at all? Maybe he doesn’t have her number or address. Maybe all he can do is grow cabbage and set the table and think that perhaps a miracle will come. I’d call it faith, but it isn’t clear to me that he believes anything in particular. I don’t even know if the point is to be ready in case she does come; maybe the point is just to go through the motions. (See also: “Elijah” on The Coroner’s Gambit.) I go back and forth on this viewpoint. Does it matter, the things you do that ultimately don’t have any effect? Is it worth it for this man to spend his final weeks on a symbolic gesture if there’s nobody there to appreciate the symbol? I can’t tell you, of course. Sometimes I think that’s the main impetus behind a belief in God, the idea that really what the universe needs is a witness. Someone who can see all these little pointless things we do, to make sure Macbeth wasn’t right about life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Unless you’re a serious scholar of world religions, the title of this song probably doesn’t mean anything to you. I’m not, so I had to Google it. In short, “Naraka” is a Buddhist/Hindu conception of Hell. (“Loka” seems to mean “realm”; I can’t find anyone else who uses it as all one word like that, but I didn’t look long.) I don’t want to butcher the concepts of someone else’s religion—I encourage you to go read about it yourself, because it is fascinating. In most traditions, Naraka is not a permanent place you go, as in mainstream Christian Hell. (I say “mainstream” because I got sucked down a serious Wikipedia rabbit hole here...) Since Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, Naraka is just another realm for you to live in for some time before passing into another cycle of rebirth, although it does include punishments for your earthly sins. The connection to the dying man in the song is imprecise. My interpretation is that he views himself as in that sort of liminal state. No longer truly alive, due to his diagnosis, but also not quite dead yet, not yet moved on to the next stage. He hangs in-between, with his regrets and his absent friends, tormented by what isn’t there.

----

Hey there, Goats! Sorry for the long delay in posting; I was on vacation with family and had no chance to type, and then I had qualifier exams, which I might have even passed. In that time, of course, there’s been the news of Beat the Champ and the release of “The Legend of Chavo Guerrero.” I of course intend to review the album, due out April 7th, but until then I probably won’t cover any singles that come out. In addition, I’ll be seeing The Mountain Goats live April 8th in Washington D.C., so I’ll have a fresh crop of good JD interaction about the new songs to add to the review. Until then, hopefully I’ll be able to step back up to weekly or biweekly singles reviews. (Current dilemma: should I do “Animal Mask” like I was planning to? I feel like it’ll probably be on the album…)

[upthegoats]

Please Come Home to Hamngatan

Hello, Tumblr. I fell behind a bit. Maybe you could forgive me? Maybe this would go better if I argued that this song is about forgiveness, and that forgiveness has some interesting ethical power? It's worth a shot.

This song is shorter than I remembered it, to be honest. I went through a bunch of other songs, got re-into-this-one, decided I would go ahead and do this (songs from Ghana are outside of my recent purview, which has been more demos and such, but I regard them as fair game). So I typed out the lyrics, as I always do so that I"ll have a reference/am forced to do a close read, and I was struck by the structural economy here. Half the lines are repeats of other lines, and the song splits cleanly into three short segments. They're short meditations on jewel thieves, snake oil, and adultery. Each time, a sentiment is expressed, and each time that sentiment is met with its negation. In all cases, the sentiment is roughly the same: you can't get away with this. There's physical evidence, or your lies are spotted, or you yourself are slipping up too much to maintain the facade you're demanding of yourself. You've been caught, although maybe not even that, because that implies you ever even had a secret. Maybe the narrator has always known about you.

My point being, each opening line of the section is confrontational. I can imagine these metaphors being traded by characters in a TV drama trying to dance around their marital problems. (I haven't seen The Affair, but maybe they do it on that show? It'd be fitting.) You might think we're getting set up to see the other person get torn into, and when you don't get that after the next line, you might imagine that it's coming at the next, more direct line. Instead, what's offered is...well, I'm not sure how to describe it. It's not conciliatory, really. There's no "it's ok" or even really an "I forgive you" (though, perhaps, there's one of omission). What we get is more like non-enforcement. An assurance that, for all the forensic evidence left behind, none of it is being collected. That the lies you're selling are being bought, knowingly. That whatever you've done, your sentence is being suspended.

I like that metaphor the best, the suspended sentence. It's not that the narrator isn't alleging guilt--while "you" aren't directly accused, it's pretty clear--it's the narrator is declining to punish you. Call that forgiveness, call it clemency, whatever. It's something with a strange ability to shift ethics around in strange ways. We believe that when people are wronged, it is just of them to seek redress, and good of them to get it. Yet, at the same time, we also hold forgiveness up as a great moral ideal--turn the other cheek, blessed are the meek, rappin' Jesus coming right at you with his boy Matthew, etc. Forgiveness is abolishing a debt, it's like burning your moral currency. I find something beautiful in that, something that transcends a strictly transactional view of justice.

At the same time, I worry about this narrator. The meaning of the song is keyed to two things: the title and the last line. Jewel thieves and snake oil peddlers--these don't make any sense without the adulterers bit to bring them into focus. The question then becomes: why? Why so magnanimous? The title hints that this isn't a domestic confrontation, not someone coming home with lipstick on their collar or whatever. This is an entreaty: please come back, I won't be mad, just come back. The narrator insists that "down here...you can't think clearly," but if we're talking about some wild place full of moose, far from civilization (Hamngatan is in the middle of Stockholm), then they're both a long way from where they should be. Comfort zones are far away, and one seems to have followed the other a long way out. I hope the narrator recognizes that at some point he has to return, with or without the people he set out to return with.

[upthegoats]

All Devils Here Now

I’m fascinated by the way the beginning of the song works in a way I almost have to call dramatic. The “neighbors” appear in the song first as non-parties to the conversation. We’re told about “your neighbors” before we get to the “we are your neighbors” line. The structure here almost suggests a reveal or twist. It’s difficult to fit much twist into that short a time, but that’s nonetheless what we have here, recreated in miniature. Every song begins with us trying to grab hold of it—we dole out characters to the voices. I’m always writing about the Narrator, or the Protagonist, or the (Sub/Ob)ject of the Song etc. Here the narrator starts off by saying “you,” so we immediately know that the narrator is not the only character, and when “your neighbors” are introduced we seem to have three creatures that, to engage with the song, we have to establish relationships between. Perhaps we have an omniscient/impersonal narrator, speaking to a protagonist, and the relationship between the protagonist and his or her neighbors will be the subject of the song. You go forward with this, you become intrigued by the mysterious behavior of these neighbors you can’t explain, and then the song hits you with a “we.” At that moment, the song structure pivots, and what you thought was happening is scrambled. The narrator is not and cannot be nobody, cannot be God or JD observing. Now they’re in the song. And they belong to a group. And, we learn, that group is the “neighbors” we were speculating about just seconds ago.

By doing this, JD brings us into the same moral looking-askance that the narrator endeavors in. JD knows and loves his Bible, and so he obviously knows his Mark 12:31, “The second [commandment] is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” With this verse, (well, with its translation) the word “neighbor” acquires dramatically more moral weight than it might have otherwise had in English. It goes from denoting “nearby thing” to “thing I am as morally responsible towards as I am to myself.” I don’t just mean that this applies to Christians, I mean that the word “neighbor” means something extra to all English speakers. When we hear about all the strange goings-on of these neighbors, all the things that might raise red flags if anyone had their eye out for red flags, we wonder what their deal is, but we don’t approach them as real characters yet. They don’t seem to be party to the conversation we’re having. But then, all of a sudden, there they are in front of us, asking—why? (I’m reminded of all the “well-meaning teachers” from “Broom People” and the neighbors who “wag their fingers in all the wrong directions” in “Up the Wolves.”) Why does the subject of the song remain a bystander? The subject “tries [his/her] best to ignore them,” a word choice that implies this is not a successful effort, which is somehow a bit more damning. It implies the almost-ignorance, the awareness that doesn’t rise to action.

The line in this song that sticks with me the most is “you see us at the grocery store, you wonder what we’re shopping for.” There’s a few different ways to interpret this. Perhaps it’s meant as a brief realization of humanity. The “you,” by wondering what the neighbors are buying, considers what their needs might be, what sort of lives they must lead. In that moment, perhaps a flicker of empathy passes between the two. On the other hand, part of me wants to say: come on. They’re at a grocery store. They’re shopping for food. That’s what people do at grocery stores. The neighbors aren’t aliens or superintelligent shades of the color blue. They do what you’d expect. This then becomes illustrative of the basic problem, which is pretending that the people we don’t know or don’t understand live across some incredible gulf. It is not so incredible. Perhaps you will never know what it is like to be them, truly, but you can at least try to understand, to see with clear eyes the facts of their daily lives. It can be a hard thing, to confront the humanity of our neglected neighbors, but we owe them at least that much.

 “Many people need desperately to receive this message: ‘I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.’” – Kurt Vonnegut

[upthegoats]

The Bad Doctor

Today, we’re looking at a song that strikes me on a level that’s more metaphysical than personal, in a way that I don’t think many other Mountain Goats songs capture. Usually tMG songs concern particular people, in particular situations—often painfully particular. Not so this one. This one gets at something bigger.

People arise from the world, but in that process they become separated from it; we spend a lot of philosophy trying to understand that distinction. Most times, of course, we just don’t think about it. Sometimes, we naturalize ourselves—discuss motivations and desires, wonder about the machinery that lies behind the human mind, and try to fit in with a mechanistic universe. Other times, we humanize the natural world—endow it with spirits and intentions, give names to the winds, and imagine ourselves as simply one type of conscious being in a universe that is nothing if not a community. From this last tradition we get magic, the gods, and the ever-present harvester that is capitalized Death. Any existentialist worth his salt will tell you that Death, more than anything else, demands an explanation. Being both inevitable and terrible, any attempt to conjure a meaningful universe must grapple with this common fate, and so we create reapers, usually grim ones. In the past, the reaper made a lot of sense, as people seem to grow for their season before the world reclaims them, just as crops do. (And I think it notable that so many funerary rites—burial, cremation, at sea—involve the body passing back into the greater continuum of nature.) Nowadays, though, not so many of us are farmers. We have a new psychopomp now, in the form of the medical profession. Most of us die in hospitals, most of us die surrounded by an infrastructure meant to stop death. When I was very young (four?), I had a great-grandparent die, and I told my family that the doctors must not have been very good. This was unfair to the doctors, as my great-grandmother smoked her whole life and passed in her eighties. They don’t deserve to be cast as Death, really, but that proximity has psychological power all the same.

These are the many morose sentences I use because I cannot launch so directly into this song. When I write these, I do so by listening to many songs until one grabs me, and then I listen to that one on repeat until I have something to say. Here, I know I have something to say, but I also feel like what I have to say needs to be skirted around, rather than something I can just tell you. So forgive me for trying to set a mood. The song begins mundanely, with the opening of a door, but immediately expands itself. As soon as we’re told that the moon “roars” we retreat from any sort of doctor’s office, and our natural next mental resting place is a realm of metaphor. The moon isn’t really roaring, we say to ourselves, John’s just trying to express something about how the sky felt to the narrator. The next line, though, gives the moon increasing humanity by first giving her a gender, and then having her rebel against her orbit. Orbits are the original mechanistic universe, the music of the spheres. Aristotle thought the heavens were made of a special fifth element, quintessence. Earth and water had gravity pulling them downward, and air and fire had levity pushing them upward. Quintessence, though, was the stuff of the heavens, and its innate nature was to swirl perpetually in perfect circles. To assert that the moon wants free of that is to immediately summon up a fundamental conflict between nature and intention. The whole natural world is a target, we’re told, and the natural world is ill at ease with being targeted.

The next verse details the physician. His features can be felt in the air, which puzzles me. Of course, “feeling of presence” is real. We know that it is different to be alone than it is to be with someone, even if they are not speaking. So we imagine this person—we are told he is immaculate, smiling, and powerful—and we can imagine knowing he is there without ever seeing him, perhaps only by viewing the greater ripples he causes in the world, perhaps only hearing it secondhand from the moon. Beyond our modern patterns of death, there are other reasons that a physician is seen as so powerful. This conflation of knowledge and power goes long back. We often portray magicians (as in wizards and witches) as those who possess secret or forbidden knowledge, who have learned things the rest of us have not. And is any knowledge so mysterious or as valued as healing? Is there another kind of magic we would value above it?

In the final verse, the natural and artificial/intentional world are again intermixed, with the rain coming down “like water from a faucet.” Then, we have this small teleportation. While this serves to highlight the supernatural aspects of the title character, it does more than that—or it should, at least, since at this point we’re already quite impressed by the man. It dredges up this idea that physicists call nonlocality. To a physicist, it means that when something happens, it only affects the space right next to it. To affect something far away, something needs to pass between the two, like a beam of light. Here, we have a stutter in reality. The doctor simply skips from one place to another, with no passage between. This is spooky because it doesn’t seem like the world we know, and yet it is also entirely the world we know. It’s a different world, the world of abstract ideas and processes rather than physics. Death disappears and reappears, here and there and everywhere, and it is not a thing that can be trapped, bottled up, slowed down. It just is, and ultimately that feels like the contradiction the song gets at. The world brings forth so much beauty, and contains in it such life, that it seems nonsensical that the processes of decay and ending would also be baked into it at such a deep level. The omnipresent action of liveliness of the universe is joined similarly by an omnipresent ending, and how are we to make sense of that? Here, we have tried to cordon death off, to imprison it in a single figure. The natural world is his target, the moon rebels against him, the stars themselves react to his presence. And yet, in the end, this is for naught. He cannot be separated from the natural world, he cannot be set aside as a separate being. Our attempt to do so is futile, because giving the phenomenon a face like ours does not give it our limitations. The world does not have or need a reaper; the world itself is quite sufficient. 

[johndarnielle]

Why the Book Tour Wasn’t Longer

digital photograph by Lalitree Darnielle, 2014

pictured, L-R: John Darnielle, Moses Darnielle (born 4 November 2014)

[upthegoats]

Up the Goats would like to congratulate John and Lalitree, and to Moses: San Bernardino welcomes you!

[upthegoats]

Ethiopians

I just remembered that, by sheer coincidence, my Tallahassee review also went up around Halloween. I think my exact comment was “what’s spookier than a failed marriage?” I haven’t written about the Alpha Couple since, so this song picked a good week to get stuck in my head. I can understand why it was cut from Tallahassee, just as I can pretty much understand what happened to “New Chevrolet in Flames.” Both have a brightness to them that doesn’t fit the slow nightmare of the final album. What I cannot even kind of understand is how this didn’t end up on the EP, but such questions are not for mortals to worry about.

The specific brightness this song concerns itself with is the joy of the Alpha Couple. Not that being in the Alpha Couple is generally very joyous—usually it’s more like drowning, I think. But there is an aspect to their relationship that they can take joy in. It’s the joy of two people happy to defy both the best hopes and the worst expectations of others. I mean, “rub their noses in the ugly fact, that we are still alive.” That line starts with an instantaneous dismissal of those friends “we used to have” from “No Children.” Their desire to finish clearing themselves out of those friends goes unstated here but clearly they’re not feeling too generous. At the same time, though, the narrator admits that it’s an “ugly fact.” It’s like someone told them to grow up and received two raspberries in reply. So that’s the relationship they have to people in their past, and the people in their present—their neighbors—are treated with suspicion. Good things their neighbors produce, like a well-kept garden, are recast as poisons. It’s the only way they can maintain their very total illusion. Presented with citizens, presented with people around you who have their shit even a little bit together, the only way you dodge the realization of how far you’ve fallen is to deny their positivity. The Alpha Couple can’t really tolerate other people’s happiness or love. They’re too self-obsessed to admit that anyone else has anything, and if they did, the comparison would be devastating.

The song’s refrain is “good things never last, bad things never die.” There’s a few different ways to read this statement, and I really like it. Is the narrator taking solace in immortality—if he can’t have a good thing, at least he’ll have something that lasts forever? Is he saying that perhaps, if this thing ends one day, that will have justified it all? Call no marriage happy until it is dead, maybe. And then finally, we have the enumeration of objects and impressions that precedes the refrain—“the swelling in our limbs, the twinkle in your eyes.” Are these good things that won’t last? Bad things that won’t die? Hard to say? I like to imagine the Alpha Male gazing into her eyes, seeing that twinkle, and just being floored, wholly unable to characterize it. There’s the JD quote about love as a destructive force, where he criticized the innately positive view of love we receive from the Romantic poets. The truth is whether you believe in love as a constructive or destructive force—and different loves are different things—it is first and foremost a force. It makes you do things, it makes you want things, and it overrides rationality with a simple flick of the wrist. The twinkle in those eyes might be one of the realest things left to the narrator, and the plain simple fact of its existence cannot be argued away, cannot be avoided with an appeal to morality or self-preservation. We know this phenomenon. We call it chemistry, or we talk about electricity. We recognize in our lovers’ slight smirk something that feels bigger than us. The feeling that one glance can set you free of gravity, and you will fly off, unbound from the Earth.

I think this song grabbed me due to one line. All the other lines are good, but none of them just straight-up work the way “I can’t think of one thing in this whole wide blessed world that’s more dangerous or frightening than you when you get bored.” It’s one of those lines that doesn’t sound romantic yet somehow manages to perfectly characterize the electric fear of love so perfectly. There’s a reason “naughty” has gotten itself tangled up in sex, you know, and it’s because there’s something dangerous about it. Some of that is our culture and its hang-ups, but some of it is a fear of the other person. We talk about our lovers “driving us crazy.” Who doesn’t fear insanity? If we’re going to be honest with ourselves I think being in love sometimes feels like standing on the edge of a tall building. You’re not going to jump, but all of a sudden you feel the possibility of it, of all those alternate selves that do. Sheer potential and raw freedom scare us, and anything that takes us too far from society’s shores makes us easy prey for the sea monsters. The Alpha Couple mention money in this song, a symbol of the greater human world that exists outside and around them, but they speak of it as if it just passes through them, and they have no concern for it. They have no place for it. It doesn’t have anything to do with them, and so it’s just one more thing to float through. We never find out where their money comes from, because it never rises to the level of mentioning. They don’t even notice it.

[eleven-bands]

upthegoats just now seeing your blog……….who do you think you are, but also god bless you

[upthegoats]

man, good question. But uh thanks, I think?

[upthegoats]

Going to Alaska

First of all, I’ve gotten a large influx of new followers lately, so welcome to newcomers. I’ve past 200, which is still frankly to me considering what a strange thing it feels like I’m doing. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing these.

Today we’re going all the way back to Taboo VI: The Homecoming, which is old and rough and different, like seeing the primordial seas of Earth when they were full of strange algae and lifeforms unrecognizable to you. Except that this is still full of tMG music, so it’s much better, and the atmosphere at Up The Goats remains oxygenated.

We know that the base theme of the “Going to…” songs is that they’re about people trying to move in the hope of escaping situations and discovering that changing geography is not the same as changing identity. At least this is something of the official line; for my money there are songs that don’t quite fit the theme, but then we need not demand a consistency. The real marker of a “Going to…” song is the focus on geography that so often permeates JD’s work. It’s always there, not just in these songs, to the extent that even the albums that are not telling one consistent story often seem to be set somewhere. If they aren’t then the geography often figures heavily in the particular songs on the album. (“Ezekiel” can’t happen properly anywhere else, for instance.) Still, in these albums we find an even more specific sense of place, often combined simultaneously with a sense of not-place, by which I just mean that the structure of “Going to…” implies a source and a destination. One place in that transaction must necessarily be absent, unless JD records “Going to Here” which would actually be pretty clever.

That sense of contrast underlies “Going to Alaska,” which spends equal time on Alaska and the narrator’s current location. Alaska is not portrayed as a particularly hospitable place. The air, the ground, and the animals are all portrayed as automatically hostile, even lethal. In contrast, the narrator’s current home is alive and vibrant, with trees growing and warmth and color and he absolutely hates it. He hates it so much. What are we to make of that? Does he hate life itself, is this a death-wish? I would argue no, because he doesn’t seem to object to his own personal experience, or imply personal unhappiness with his own state of being alive. His grievances seem far more specific. His current home is multiply referenced as being “meaningful” whether it’s in the shifting of sap or the buried bodies of the past, and it’s clearly abundant in its life support with the trees. Those trees, though, which he once recognized, now only show traces of what they were and are full of “alien electricity.” At the same time as all this biological change, he can’t escape the ghosts of buried relatives, puppeteering the world around him, everything flowing from past causes he can’t control.

The narrator is vexed by liveliness, and this liveliness has two costs: first, it inevitably estranges him from the world as he knew it, because as soon as he knows it the world changes, shifts, becomes something new and different and alien. It all means something and it all wants to grow, but in doing so it changes from a world he feels a part of to a world in which he can only find traces of the past. The second cost is that implies the presence of the dead. This is the one that makes his situation aggravating as it stops him from welcoming the passage of time. You might imagine that one upside to constant, alienating change would be at least the opportunity to yourself be constantly reinvented, but the problem is that the past weighs heavy on the present. He’s hemmed in by the entanglements of past relatives, by the traces of the old world that lives on in his memories. He cannot be a continuous creature of the present moment, because he is cursed by history and memory to live partly in the past even as that past becomes further and further separated from the real world around him. So he’s going to Alaska, a dead place, where language is pulled out of the air and cannot be used to generate a history; where a deadly animal attack doesn’t really matter because nobody sees it and it doesn’t reverberate in stories to the next generation. He’s seeking to escape the meaning evident in that sap, because that meaning traps him. A meaningless world is at least one where he would be free of what’s behind him.

[upthegoats]

Attention All Pickpockets

I thought I'd forgotten this song's title for a while, because it was getting tangled in my head with Decemberists lyrics. I found it again in my YouTube history, which consists entirely of obscure tMG songs and Space Jam mashups. This is all I listen to ever, and it is key to all my personal success. Anyway.

In some ways, the simple passage of time is inescapably tragic. Not the events that lie within that, not the rocks in the stream, but just the stream itself. The past is dead, and so are the people we were back then. We don't stop to mourn them, because we think of ourselves as representing a continuation, but that just means the death is slower. The person I was ten minutes ago still seems to be around, the person I was ten years ago is quite assuredly gone. I am not bemoaning adulthood, and I have no real wish to return to childhood--I've always found that viewpoint oddly self-limiting. Even if we do not wish to be those people again, however, their passing remains worth mourning. They may not have been good or virtuous, but from a remove and at this distance, who notices? The dead who were us are simply dead, and we must mourn them without judgment. Whoever they were, they sacrificed themselves bringing us into this world, just as we inevitably sacrifice ourselves again for another person down the line who will look much like us.

To me, this song is about a moment realizing this truth. The narrator sees someone from his own past, and notes that she is “not the same person I knew.” This must be a different person then. She looks the same, but has changed somehow. In that moment, he sees the problem: he doesn’t know this person in front of him. He knew some earlier version. A superficial resemblance connects these two people, but it takes more than the shape of a face and a few shared memories to claim an identity.

Immediately after this realization, the narrator is forced to consider its implications. Minds are not necessarily totally consistent, but it is impossible to realize a fact without being affected by it.  As Camus says, “There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, a man is always prey to his truths.” So for our narrator, his sudden sighting of this familiar stranger is complemented with his own recognition that he is “not the same person that you used to know.” By positioning himself in this way, as a different person, he alienates himself from his past. It is not only her that is changing; he also cannot claim a continuous, coherent life. He has come too far for that, for better or worse.

The chorus, short though it is, offers a picture of this absurd realization. Music, plants—the natural world and the standard fare of urban landscapes, and in this setting we find these two. It’s important that he expresses their identity as a pair, I believe, and it gives us a new statement, not just a reiteration of the previous few lines. He doesn’t recognize this new person; she would not recognize him; people who knew them both would recognize neither, and would also have no idea what to make of the pair of them, meeting haphazardly and without acknowledgment. Presumably these people were once close, if they had and shared old friends. Now, there is barely such a category as “us two,” and it exists mainly in legacy.

As she moves on, his only real observation is that she moves across the “dark damp earth,” which bears much resemblance to the “bruised earth” of “Letters from Belgium.” Similarly, here the woman is a wanderer, passing through. She is “beating a path” which doesn’t speak well to her relationship to her environment. Explorers and warriors beat paths. Animals do not beat paths in their native habitats; people do not beat paths through their homes. Paths are beaten when no paths forward are already present. All he can do is wish her well, hope for her to find the money she is after. The title song suggests her means, or perhaps his means.  That, however, is in the future, and so it concerns still different people. The real main characters of this song died long ago, slowly, and the people they became never even noticed that they were gone. It’s only here, among oleanders and through the unnatural, distorted frame of a lens, that the isolation that time has brought them can finally be felt.

[upthegoats]

Wolf In White Van

(When I review songs or albums, I do so assuming you’ve also listened to them. In contrast, what follows is spoiler-free.)

A friend asked me what Wolf in White Van was about yesterday. I hesitated before replying, “It’s about a man with a terrible facial disfiguration, and he runs a play-by-post roleplaying game.” This is a true statement, but what I wanted to answer was that Wolf in White Van is about aftermaths. (“Aftermaths” is what the British say instead of “aftermath.”) There is one big, obvious event that the story orbits around. I mean “orbit” precisely: as the narration approaches the event, it speeds up, seeming to get closer and closer to its ultimate truth, before being flung back out into space for another trip around the system that is this narrative. The event itself is a black hole, I think, and there is no safe path directly through it. Along the way, we have plenty of other aftermaths, on long and short time scales, of important events and smaller ones. Even the game Sean invents, Trace Italian, is post-apocalyptic, set in the aftermath of the world. The narrative plays out on several time frames, and is rich with reminiscing. Several scenes don’t seem like aftermaths at all, until you learn the context. I am honestly considering a complete re-read to see how it all fits together again. At the same time, the book is intensely concerned with shelter—the main goal of the players in Sean’s game is to find shelter, especially ironic as so many of them have come to the game itself for shelter from the external reality. Sean himself is in a constant sheltered state, apart from the world. He is safe, but he is also separate, and while his players race their way toward their imaginary shelter, Sean himself has that shelter—all to himself, alone.

Do I need to include a paragraph saying that the language is beautiful? Of course it is. John Darnielle is an exacting songwriter, and he brings those talents to bear here. Yes, he can spin out an imaginative sentence with great imagery, but more importantly he understands rhythm, cadence, pacing. He writes prose with a poet’s precision. JD here has no musical meter to respect, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t make the English language sing.  I was fascinated to see what JD would write like when he was working somewhere new, when the base assumptions of form were changed. This wasn’t a wonder born of doubt—I knew he would pull it off—I just wanted to see what he’d come up with given a clear new frontier. He meets the challenge ably. There were places where the tone or theme reminded me of some Mountain Goats songs, of course. The narrator’s isolation and visions of destruction remind me of “Autoclave,” for instance, while the quiet moments of aftermath and silence that cannot be disrupted perhaps correspond most closely to “Design Your Own Container Garden.”

These comparisons are facile; in truth, this is something new. A book with a first-person narrator introduces you to a new person in an exceptionally intimate way. As someone who frequently talks to themselves, who’s prone to composing little mental monologues to nobody, I envy the somewhat unnatural condition that narrators are placed in. They tell us everything, all their thoughts, all their emotions. Even their omissions reveal their character. So, over the course of this book’s two hundred pages, you begin to know Sean. This might be a banal observation, but I believe it’s important: I just named the main character. In all of the Mountain Goats oeuvre, how many character names do you know? How many of those characters are narrators, how many of them do you truly come to know in the way that you would after two hundred pages of intense character study? The Alpha Couple, maybe. The lightly poeticized version of JD who appears in the autobiographical works, perhaps. Outside of that, we have the song-by-song fragments of lives, rather than coherent wholes. Are these songs often beautiful, perfectly descriptive, able to capture an immense amount of truth in their three minutes? Yes, but they are still only those short songs, and for as well as I can picture the main character of “Heretic Pride,” I do not know him simply because I have observed his one fateful moment. Here, on the other hand, we have ages to explore and to examine this character.

I was a little inclined to describe the novel as “plotless,” to emphasize its character-driven nature. Wolf In White Van is primarily concerned with exploring the state of its narrator. I’ve realized now there is quite a bit of plot, but it’s so caught up in the character that it seems difficult to extricate the two. Sean is what happens (or has happened already) in the book, and what happens in the book flows from who Sean is, and between the two it seems silly to draw boxes and declare certain sets of attributes plot or character related. The plot of this book is exploration, an exploration of what’s happened and how Sean got to the point he is at—and all that’s happened along the way. In a way, the book invites you on an impossible task: understanding Sean. Sean doesn’t understand Sean, either, so this is something for the both of you to work on. But maybe if you listen to him try to understand himself for a few hundred pages you’ll get a glimpse.

[upthegoats]

Star Dusting

"This is a horror story."

Kind of cheeky for our dear Mr Darnielle to throw that out. Because Mountain Goats songs are so cheap with the details, it doesn't take much direct instruction to dramatically change the direction of the song. This song was never going to be happy, but now we have an explicit intention: we are to be horrified. Instantly, our interpretation crystallizes outward from that fact. Suddenly, small details which you might not have noticed, or might have dismissed as irrelevant, start dancing around your mind, trying to find a way to horrify you. For example, why does the narrator's loved one ask if it's getting warmer, when the narrator himself has to put on a jacket? Why all the unintelligible mumbling? Without the horror context, maybe I'd just chalk it up to showing some sort of huge divide between the narrator and his companion. Why does she/he have a "little corner," and is it as verminous as the one in "Amy"? 

"I thought I heard bells ringing but then I remembered that I no longer knew what bells sounded like" is a fascinating line. This is a very short song (to be honest, I thought it was longer until I started writing up a post on it...) so such a strange line is hard to place. To me, it suggests an incredible amount of time--like Gollum forgetting what the sun looks like--but also it brings the past into the song's framework. That line makes it not a song about where the narrator is, but also about how his distance from where he used to be. There were bells, at some point. He still remembers that, but only by name. He can't really call them to mind anymore. What kind of bells are we meant to think of? Edgar Allan Poe has an obvious list available for us, which really just underscores that bells represented, for a long time, the first broadcasting. If you don't remember what bells sound like, perhaps it shows that you've become incredibly isolated from the great community of man. Perhaps Las Vegas is simply a terribly isolating place, which seems kind of reasonable. Though, I think it's probably not quite so complicated. Personally, it sounds to me like wedding bells. Then we have a husband and a wife, totally failing to communicate, not even in agreement about the temperature. (Though, well, is there a couple that agrees on that?) That's a little horrifying in and of itself, but the specter of forgetfulness raised by the bells line makes me uneasy. Specifically, it brings up the awful concept of Alzheimer's and other diseases that rob people of themselves. The sort of thing that leaves someone in a corner, not sure where they are or what their environment is like. Something that makes a conversation, so dearly desired, a matter of luck and the chance of how good each passing day is. I've seen this happen, I've seen people go that way, and I can't imagine anything worse than living with someone as they slip away--from you, from the world, from themselves. These are horror stories.

(p.s. I got Wolf in White Van on like, Thursday but I wanted to get to the halfway point in Don Quixote before I put that book on pause, which I did tonight. So, I can start on WIWV now, and probably will soon.)