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Friday, June 30, 2006
KID DYNAMITE
Squirrel Bait
Skag Heaven
Drag City :1987
[Buy It]
You might imagine people painting houses, as they're listening to this song. Or maybe you see them driving home from work, or to it. Or maybe they're just standing around in 1986, being younger. I think I speak for all of us when I say, "Hmm." When you listen to music you used to listen to a long time ago, it brings up the same feelings it used to bring up. But now, unsurprisingly, or surprisingly, the feelings are older. Old feelings. Imagine that. A nine-year-old feeling, a sixty-five-year-old feeling. Squirrel Bait is from Louisville, Kentucky. Or, they were, at one point. This song could be construed as the national anthem of a short-lived and violent country that turned out to just be some kid.
BIG SHIP
Brian Eno
Another Green World
EG : 1975
[Buy It]
This song, it only takes a few listens to realize, doesn't have any words in it. Nonetheless, or maybe, therefore, the story is very clear and forceful, with little vulgarity and few contradictions. "Big Ship" is an opera about life in a small pond. Listening, you should see gentle grasses and frogs, a circling hawk, a young deer standing completely still, also listening. Maybe water dripping cinematically off a leaf. And then, suddenly, finally, at the right moment, in slow motion, bursting through the smooth surface of the small pond, a breaching whale. Or you'll imagine a different libretto altogether-- no whale, no deer, none of the details above, no details at all. If you look up "breaching" in the dictionary, you'll find that it's done by whales "purely for play or to loosen skin parasites, or it may have some social meaning, or be used to communicate with other whales." Ah, words, dictionaries. Ah, "breaching." It's for communication or for loosening parasites-- something like that. "Big Ship" is an instrumental. No words. A model of composition. The rare song that seems to have written itself, that then seems to play itself, and then seems to end.
WILD BILLY'S CIRCUS
Bruce Springsteen
The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle
Columbia : 1973
[Buy It]
I always saw the tuba as an instrument that fell to its unlucky player by some kind of fairly simple height-and-weight-chart default. Find a bellowing kind of kid, maybe with some Europe somewhere in his blood, who is big enough to at least hold the thing off the ground, and there you have it: your tuba player. One of the last two kids left, when the instruments get handed out, the other smaller of whom gets one end of a banner to hold. Then I heard this song. Then I saw small children standing along the nation's parade routes, bored by the majorettes and the more-wieldy instruments, bored by ceremony and commemoration and wishing for rain, until suddenly the tubas came marching by. "What is that beautiful sound?" I saw their curious faces and the storefronts of their little towns reflected in the giant horns. I heard them saying, "That's the sound I was born to make. That's the huge thing I was born to carry." It's a much a happier world when you believe that tuba players are tuba players simply because they wanted to play the tuba. "Wild Billy's Circus Story" has a tuba in it, prominently. The sound sends you back, to somewhere unrecognizable. It's an old-fashioned but un-placeable sound. The notes are round and lumbering, and have a close but somewhat comic relation to gravity and pain. The words in the song are good, too. Yes, sir. Oompah. God save the human cannonball, indeed.
THERE'S A STAR ABOVE THE MANGER TONIGHT
Red Red Meat
There's a Star Above the Manger Tonight
Sub Pop : 1997
[Buy It]
Let's skip considering what this song might sound like or mean or the question of whether it's religious. As a song, interestingly, it doesn't need you or me. It has a banjo in it, or something like a banjo. The band is from Chicago, possibly. My friends' little boy Benjamin calls it "dog music," for some reason. He plays Little League with a kid who is much bigger than the other kids, supposedly because he got struck by lightning.
ACHE
Jawbreaker
24 Hour Revenge Therapy
Tupelo : 1994
[Buy It]
There's something for everyone, in this song, if everyone is a self-destructive and broken-hearted sea captain of Celtic descent who loves hard guitar rock. This has the legitimately haunting echo of a sea shanty or a work song. Plus some hard guitar. There are certain songs that might be said to be suitable for framing. Whatever that would mean, I think we would agree that this is probably not one.
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME ('CHEERS')
The Wedding Present
Singles 1995-1997
Spin Art : 1997
[Buy It]
Enough, maybe you say, of rock 'n' roll covers of television-show theme songs. And maybe you say, enough, of a nostalgia for a nostalgia that was just commercial slop to begin with. But, quiet down, quiet down, and gaze upon the damp fluorescence of the dishwashing area of a bar/restaurant in Western Massachusetts. See a dishwasher named Peter, hunched over with scoliosis, and hear him say, as he always said, "I know I'm not going far in life, I know I wasn't meant for big things." See Peter and the other dishwashers singing along to this song, as loudly as they can, unembarrassed, unashamed for once. You never saw such joy, such glad white people, in your life. Enough, would you say, of these dishwashers and their happiness? Enough, of their fleeting moment of community? Of course, you wouldn't. So have a listen and don't say anything. Pretend your sneakers are all wet, and you're stuck somewhere you don't want to be, feeling that everything in the world is either above or to the side of you, and that you are-- along with your good co-workers-- friendless in this world, friendless. From that perspective, in the spray of the sprayer, in the middle of a bad year, I hope you won't find anything in the experience that is not excellent.
. . . . . . . . . .
Will Eno is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Helen Merrill Playwriting Fellow, and a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. His play THOM PAIN (based on nothing) was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Drama and has since been performed in many different languages and around the U.S. The past year, he has been at Princeton University, teaching playwriting, and as a Hodder Fellow. An excerpt of his play TRAGEDY: a tragedy appears in Harper's Magazine, this June. His plays are published by Oberon Books, in London, and by TCG, in the United States.Labels: will eno, writer's week
posted by Alex
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