Songs That Got Me Through It
There are some songs I have to be in a certain mood to listen to, and some songs I listen to in order to change my mood. (Lou Reed’s Magic and Loss album is the former. It’s a brilliant but reasonably monotone album about his friends dying. Joey Ramone’s cover of “What a Wonderful World” is the latter — it is a three-minute ear-to-ear smile.)
So, in the days after the election, I tweeted out a bunch of songs, and they’re sort of a mixture of both: stuff that reflected how I felt, stuff that I hoped would make me feel better, and stuff that I hoped would help me reach beyond the mundane and towards something else.
Old punk rock helped get me through high school, like the whole CBGB and New York scene: The Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, The Dead Boys, the New York Dolls, Richard Hell’s bands like the Voidoids and the Heartbreakers, and when I got to college I found out about bands like the Shirts, Suicide, Tuff Darts, and the Dictators. It was fast and angry and fast, and as someone said about the Ramones, “loud at any volume.”
I was into the ’70s guys in high school; in college and afterwards, I got more into the ’80s, like Husker Du and the Meat Puppets and the Minutemen and the Replacements and Steve Albini’s band Big Black. I recently saw his current band, Shellac, in concert, and they were abrasive, uncompromising, fearless. The word, I think, is “bracing.”
It’s the feeling of punching a wall because you need to hit something hard, digging nails into your skin because you need to feel something. Sometimes, music that’s easy to listen to doesn’t cut it. Some music should be abrasive, difficult to access. Not all art should be as beautiful on the outside as it is on the inside. Smokey Robinson songs are perfect in every level. A lot of songs by other bands, from Pere Ubu to The Residents, all but dare the listener to give up. But their pleasures can be even more indelible.
That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes of all time, by Matt Groening, talking about Captain Beefheart’s legendary and indescribable album Trout Mask Replica:
It was a double record set, it cost $7, it was too much, but Frank Zappa’s name was on it, so I bought it. I took it home, I put it on. It was the worst dreck I’d ever heard in my life. I said, “They’re not even trying! They’re just playing randomly!” And then I thought, “But Frank Zappa produced it — maybe I better give it another play.” So I played it again, and I thought, “It sounds horrible, but they mean it to sound this way.” And about the third or fourth time it started to grow on me. And the fifth or sixth time, I loved it. And the seventh or eighth time, I thought it was the greatest album ever made and I still do.
There’s also something achingly romantic about punk rock, something so tender that it‘s typically bathed in irony for protection. That romantic streak is what won Patti Smith a National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, and it’s what director Penelope Spheeris captured in her documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, about punk in Los Angeles in 1980, and her love of her subjects warms every cel. (Her unabashed adoration of ridiculously loud music is the biggest reason that her most famous movie, Wayne’s World, holds up as well as it has.)
I didn’t listen to west coast punk nearly as much growing up, and Decline of Western Civilization was unavailable on DVD till a couple of years ago, but when I finally got my hands on it, it was as raw as the day she shot it. Tragic icons like Darby Crash appeared alongside romantic leads Exene Cervenka and John Doe, forgotten punks like Alice Bag, uncategorizable wonders like the French journalist-singer Kickboy Face, and the mesmerizingly terrifying Fear. I became a bit obsessed with it, watching both of its sequels, then watching the director’s commentary for each. It gives me hope unblemished by bathos.
But I needed irony, too. I’m not quite ready to face the morrow without bitterly joking about it. The 2016 campaign featured the most successful run for president by a socialist candidate ever, and so I started listening to a bit more Scritti Politti than usual — a R&B-influenced pop band with a couple hits in the ’80s who named themselves after a book by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. (I don’t really understand why Bernie Sanders and his supporters didn’t just bang Scritti Politti at all of their rallies, but then, there are a lot of things I don’t understand about politics.)
“Perfect Way” is a perfect time capsule, a song that sounds exactly like it was made in 1985, but it’s also as sharp a critique of modern romance as the day it was released. Strangely, the first time I ever heard “Perfect Way” was in Miles Davis’s inexplicable cover of it, which he put on his album Tutu, one of my favorite albums in high school.
I have always approached music as a series of rabbit holes. I’ve never used Pandora; I’m more of a bargain-bin hunter. I prefer to hear an artist album by album rather than a genre song by song. So when I read a glowing recommendation of an album by a Marxist Scottish folk singer that was written by my favorite comedian, I started listening. I soon realized that I needed just about everything he had ever done.
(The comedian is Stewart Lee, a sometime rock critic and radio host for a couple of decades; the album is Handful of Earth by Dick Gaughan. It cost a bit to get the import CDs of Dick Gaughan’s old band Five Hand Reel, who made a few great albums before falling apart in bitter acrimony over distribution rights, but it was well worth it. The records are fantastic, and Gaughan is an artist for whom bitter acrimony may be his most effective register.)
Folk music and punk music are similar in two respects. They demand an extraordinarily low bar of technical proficiency in order for their performers to begin to share what’s on their mind.
And a whole lot of them absolutely despise the government.
But I don’t — as much as I admire vehement clarity in art, I have no use for it in politics. (I’m grateful for Simon Munnery’s satirical character Alan Parker Urban Warrior, as pointed a piss-take on punk as punk is on everything else.)
I couldn’t bear to remain any longer in bitter earnest. I needed something wistful, mystical, transcendent, beyond direct political allegory. Murray Attaway’s ’80s Atlanta band Guadalcanal Diary was in the brilliant southern jangle-pop scene — along with bands like Let’s Active, the dB’s, the Connells, and R.E.M.— but his first solo album added an almost religious depth. I needed an anchor in the eternal, or at least the inexpressible, for momentary succor.
So what will be the soundtrack of the coming years? What will I listen to in the event of nuclear proliferation? (Maybe “‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street” by The Jam.) New restrictions on abortion and voting rights? (Maybe “Don’t Worry About the Government” by Talking Heads.) The repeal of the Affordable Care Act? (Maybe “It’s Epidemic” by the Cops.) A trade war with China? (Maybe “Rough Trade” by Stiff Little Fingers.) And whatever the new president’s policies may be, it’s likely that “Refugee” by Oi Va Voi will remain depressingly relevant.
These emotions — anger, sarcasm, faith, humor, romance—describe pretty much all of popular music. I tend to like music when it’s faster, louder, and chock full of chunky riffs I can nod my head to without worrying that I don’t know the words. There are plenty of words in every day’s headlines that I wish were as indecipherable as the mumbled screams of most of the guys I put on to make myself feel better.
I look at the lyric sheets occasionally, too. But I often forget the words just after reading them. It’s a luxury.
