This is a post about a song.
Which song?
This song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8jxAKmojxY
This song is a good song from a good album by a good artist. It checks all the 2018/19 good song boxes: synths, guitars, anger, vague thematic connection to the 80s. It is so good it was featured on a good TV show about mental illness and depression disguised as a cartoon about a talking horse.
So far so… you get the idea.
Over the past few months since hearing this song I’ve begun to suspect it does something to me. This is not an uncommon state to admit to. Over my many years of music appreciation, or at least since realising Coldplay are the Radiohead for Phil Collins fans*, many songs have done similar things.
Thunder Road turned me into an obnoxious traveller type who never shuts up about that one time they were offered ayahuasca.
Don’t Fear the Reaper reshaped how I view my relationship with my father, the concept of mortality and the appeal of 70s prog-rock.
Blurred Lines made me physically sick.
But Los Ageless is different. Los Ageless is inspiring.
Each and every time I hear the opening wind-up I suddenly crave the click-clackiness of a good keyboard under my fingers.
Motivation, as I may have mentioned before, is a fleeting thing, an ephemeral odour on winds that only occasionally blow my way. To carry the metaphor through, Los Ageless is a desk fan baubled with Inspiration-brand air fresheners pointed directly into my nasal cavity.
I lack the musical vocabulary to delve too deep into the mechanics of all this, but I know what I like about it: The grinding curl of Anne Clark’s voice, at various points tragic, pathetic and so overwhelmed by an inner tempest of rage you can feel the barely restrained scream, the Casio drumbeat underpinning the whole affair with an unstoppable forward momentum, the peals and shifts of the synths that immediately bring to mind sunswept highways and out of control open-top Cadillacs.
On first listen I assumed it was a love song, a dirge aimed squarely at an individual leaving a trail of shattered lovers by the wayside. The fact it takes aim instead at a culture, represented by the distorted LA of the song’s title, if anything made it that much more relatable. Ostensibly a diatribe against the increasingly vacuous concept of celebrity, its anger somehow transcends its own critique and becomes universal.
In Los Ageless, we are told, “the waves they never break. They build and build until you don’t have no escape.” Coupled with the grind and scream of a rust rendered guitar this becomes less an image from Sunset Boulevard and more a global idea of the inescapability of personal expectation, and the inevitable failure to ever live up to your own lofty ideals. This idea of being carried along not by physical circumstance but by natural and seemingly inescapable phenomena that grow endlessly without ever reaching a climax becomes a stinging indictment of the 21st century’s meritocratic grind culture.
“How can I leave?” indeed.
As damning as the lyrics are (“I try to write you a love song but it comes out a lament”) it’s not these alone that create in me the unbearable need to create. In all honesty, I don’t want to know what exactly it is about this particular song that inspires this feeling, for fear that identification will render the mystery solved and the magic mundane.
For the moment I’m simply glad it exists as it does, and that each time I clamp burly headphones to my skull the bolt of lightning still shrieks from the earpiece to my chest.
This is the thirteenth entry in my ongoing series of freewritten doodlings. The rational behind this is here: https://goo.gl/hi9Ub7
