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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
SO LONG MARIANNE
Leonard Cohen
Songs of Leonard Cohen [reissue]
Sony Legacy : 2007
[Buy It]
WEDDING BELL
Beach House
Devotion
Carpark : 2008
[Buy It]
SO INTO YOU
Shudder to Think
Pony Express Record
Sony : 1994
[Buy It]
ALL I NEED
Radiohead
In Rainbows
self-released : 2007
[Buy It]
Narcissus died for his own reflection. Orpheus followed Eurydice to Hades, lost her anyway, and invented pederasty. Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships of war. Epimetheus married the keeper of all the evils of the world. Penelope wilted while Odysseus sailed the world.
Of all the good and fine things a person can feel, is there one more precarious than devotion? To be devoted to something can be noble, enlarging, even saintly, yet it's just a hair's breadth away from states of being that are much less fine. Devotion can be a snare, as Leonard Cohen knows well. "I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web is fastening my ankle to a stone." This is a clever image, and a frightening one. Devotion makes us feel as if the alternative to it is a free-fall into a chasm. The world becomes whittled down to one infinitely bright and safe point, around which infinite chaos rages. It is a connection that is both delicate - therefore tenuous - and surprisingly difficult to get free of; like a spider web, the link of devotion is stronger than it appears, and easier to stretch than to sever.
Devotion can be an enslavement. We all choose our masters, but devotion is sneaky - it's a master that can appear in the guise of a liberator. The band Beach House has spent two albums teasing out the dark seam between devotion and thrall. The lovers in "Wedding Bell" are "swimming in the seas [they] know so well," this is comforting and confining at once. Devotion makes a stranger of other seas. "Oh, but your wish is my command," Victoria Legrand sings, slipping into her comfortable shackles. "Is your heart still mine for sale? I'd like yours, here is mine." Devotion, so close to servitude, is difficult to reconcile with personal agency. It chooses us, and our free will only comes into play in accepting or rejecting it. Either choice has the potential to skew toward darkness.
Devotion can easily bleed into obsession. The line is so thin that almost every love song ever written can tilt toward the sinister if you look at it just slightly askew. Shudder to Think made this overt with their cover of Atlanta Rhythm Section's feel-good track "So Into You". The lyrics are the same, but ARS's version sounds like a crush. Shudder to Think's seething inversion turns it into a stalker monologue:
When you walked into the room
There was voodoo in the vibes
I was captured by your style
But I could not get your eyes
Now I stand here helplessly
Hoping you'll get into me
I am so into you
I can't think of nothing else
Devotion can be a compromise, a case of diminished options. "I only stick with you," Thom Yorke sings on one haunting song from In Rainbows, "because there are no others." Devotion is obliterative, its object can come to seem like a black hole that devours the light from everything else. As a tin-foil-hatted paranoid, Yorke as written a lot of the finest songs about the ambiguous nature of romantic devotion. "All I Need" might be his finest in this vein, rendering the concept's seamy underbelly in a way that seems much more deliberate than Atlanta Rhythm Section and their ilk's accidental double-entendres. Here, Yorke is "an animal trapped in your hot car" and "all the days that you choose to ignore." He's a "moth that just wants to share your light" and "an insect trying to get out of the night." Devotion, for him, is both running-to and running-from, neither is the stable state he tacitly idealizes. He recognizes that, in the supplicated posture of devotion, he's both central and suborned: "I'm in the middle of your picture, lying in the reeds." To want something and to fear wanting it is an intractable position, and appropriately, he ends the song by metaphorically throwing up his hands: "It's all wrong, it's all right, it's all wrong."Labels: brian, devotion
posted by Brian
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