alisteningjournal

[alisteningjournal]

I am Bowie in Berlin, smoking a cigarette in a small courtyard while taking a break from recording the trilogy, half-way between what my life has been and what it will be.

[alisteningjournal]

I.

Last week, on the suggestion of a journalist from Australia, I listened to “The Radicalisation of D” while having breakfast one morning.

This track is haunting–– I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since, and have listened far more times than (strikes me as) healthy. It is the blackest shade of black; a modern day horror story or an episode of The Twilight Zone without any punchline. At sixteen minutes, it’s offensively long for a song that’s a few notes and chords that alternate back and forth, performed only by a guy and a guitar.

Guy + guitar is the most elemental form of our conception of popular music. There are, when you think about it, really only two modes of musical performance: times when there is a central performer, and times when there isn’t. Pop music is (mostly) the former.  Instrumental music: jazz, jam bands, post-rock, string bands, orchestras (in other words, niche genres that appeal at their core to other musicians) are the latter. (We’ll ignore electronic music today, which seeks a third place, where the music comes from no one and nowhere, but often just ends up hovering between points Y and Z).

The point being that in popular music there’s always a story, because at the center of what you’re consuming is a singular person. Whether the story is true or not, is connected to that person or not, it exists, because that person is opening their mouth and using language. Language creates images. We attach ourselves to the images in order to make sense of our lives.

The guitar remains static throughout the piece. It seriously doesn’t change at all. Maybe at some points Liddiard strikes it a little harder, plucks with more vigor, but ultimately, the music is not the driving force here. Intonation and storytelling are essentially the main focus of “The Radicalisation of D,” like the rest of Strange Tourist. The intonation is one long rise, from a soft, almost spoken monologue to the very last verse, where Liddiard is howling so hard that you can barely make out what he’s saying through his West Australian accent.

The words meanwhile are the hook, snaking back and forth through ominous images that squirm with tension one moment and then seem to release a second later, only to come alive again in the next line. This excerpt from the end of the first verse, when D is a young boy, is a good example:  

They find some car keys, Go outside and search a V8 car And there's a Beta tape in a brown paper bag, Hid under a seat, Hit play on the VCR machine And start to hear flute music Now there's two girls on a farm somewhere, Playing with a labrador Which rolls onto its back, like it has Been through this before and It's the last time D hears flute music, The last time he thinks about girls He sneaks home about 10 o'clock Gets inside using the dog door

In one memorable moment, D finds a King Kong doll on the side of the road after he gets sent home from school for throwing rocks at a girl he likes. He picked it up, and “it roars ants when he shakes it,” so he throws it out.

The arc of the song is a progression on this theme. Think of the opening scene of Blue Velvet, after Jeffrey’s father collapses on the front lawn, when the camera zooms into a nest of insects swarming in the grass. The repeated message that Liddiard hammers home is “there is a sickness underlying everything,” from ants and tape worms to institutionalized racism.

II.

On April 16, 2013, I took the subway into downtown Boston. The green line was closed beyond Hynes Convention Center, so I got out and walked along Newbury Street. The barricades that had been erected along Boylston Street for the marathon were still there. Police in neon yellow jackets milled around behind each one.

I had attended college in downtown Boston for four years and a month before graduation, someone bombed the city’s banner event. I already felt like the world was ending; this didn’t help. Though I had recovered from the depression that had plagued me for much of 2012, I was burning out hard as the end of my formal schooling approached. I’d given everything I had for twenty-two years. I needed to rest.

As I approached the Common, I saw the news crews. They had set up along the entrance to the Public Garden on Boylston Street, trying to get a tiny sliver of the distant Copley Plaza, where the bombing occurred, into the frame. 

I was a journalism student. I’d come downtown to find some kind of work to do, to be useful. I went to the college radio station. My friend Henry was there, along with the new director he’d begun a fling with several weeks earlier. She was tense, maybe because she was trying to produce news breaks under pressure, maybe  because she was trying to produce news breaks under pressure with Henry lounging around, or maybe because the city where we lived had been bombed less than a day before.

She and Henry were talking about what the tape they’d managed to get. They were juniors, still a year from graduation, and I felt like there was something vaguely unrealistic about the way they talked about it, like this was another assignment they were trying to score highly on.

I knew right then that I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. I can’t remember if I said much of anything, but I know I didn’t stay long. After I left, I walked up Huntington Avenue to avoid the news crews. When I’d reached the other end of reflection pool outside at the Christian Science center and I sat on a grassy strip that looks out onto Massachusetts Avenue and began to cry. I felt like I had no idea what I was doing anymore. I was horrified by everything that was happening. Five months earlier, I’d sat in the same newsroom while news broke about the massacre at Sandy Hook; five months before that, the Aurora Theater massacre. Without noticing, life had become a bloodbath broken only by long stints of sleepiness in which I was absorbed into other things.

The morning of the bombing, Sheep had slept over. When we woke up, we watched five minutes of the marathon and then disconnected the Internet, declaring it “for losers.” She worked on a school project; I washed the back deck. It was spring time, we had each other. No matter how scary the future seemed, at least we had each other.

Then, the panicked calls from friends and families. We plugged the router back in. We sat there on my futon just going over update after update, unable to turn away. Sheep asked if it was a terrorist attack and I said, “don’t say that, we don’t know yet.” I saw a picture of a man in a wheelchair with the bottom part of his legs blown off–– just sticks of bone where his calves should be–– looking dazed like I felt, like I would feel for the rest of the week.

There’s a moment from the “The Radicalisation of D” that clicked with this period this morning. After D is expelled from school, a man steals an APC and drives through the streets of Perth.

Channel 7 gets the scoop again, There's a man gone crazy He stole an APC from the army base And closed down half the city D's been expelled from school and he's quite happy Staying in bed He keeps track of all the updates, Surfing networks instead This tank arrives at police HQ about 8am It makes pancakes out of 5 or 6 patrol cars and then Runs out of diesel near a Castrol service station And there's a standoff Then he's teargassed and Not heard of again

The end of that week, while Dzhokar Tsarnaev was hiding in a boat in a backyard Watertown three miles from my apartment and waiting to die, I was awake from two in the morning until they arrested him at six that night, following EVERY SINGLE UPDATE on my laptop. At a certain point, the reputable outlets couldn’t keep up with my voracious need for information so I began to look at Reddit, where people were throwing around possibilities about what was going on, armchair investigators had their scanners tuned to police bands, and everyone was engaged in an act of digital nail biting.

I wonder now how I can square this person addicted to the violence with the person I was earlier in the week, a journalism student who felt to fragile to be a journalist. Without a doubt, that week affected my course in the last four years. I haven’t found a real journalism job since.

III.

When I first heard “The Radicalisation of D,” I was reminded of the song “Oh Comely” by Neutral Milk Hotel. “Oh Comely” is also just a guy and a guitar. (There some horns at the end, but ignore that for a second.)

In the 33 1/3 for In The Aeroplane Over the Sea, Kim Cooper recounts the recording of that song, which was just Jeff Mangum  alone on a stool with an acoustic guitar. The rest of the band, along with everyone else in Rob Schneider’s house, had been crammed into the console room and watched him––improbably–– lay out the whole fucking song in a single take. Cooper points out, and I’ve confirmed, that at the end of the song Neutral Milk Hotel horny player Scott Spillane can be heard in the background shouting “HO-LEE SHIT!”

When I first began learning guitar, I would practice with songs I knew that were two or three chords, like “Oh Comely.” I never managed to pull that song off in front of anyone because there’s a ferocity to singing it. You can’t do it while trying to imitate Mangum’s intonation. You have to feel out the expression of each syllable and make it into your own.

I have not tried to play “Radicalisation of D” but I can tell that it’s a similar challenge, complicated by Liddiard’s thick West Australian accent that renders words in a warped, chilling, shivers-down-my-spine sound. In that very last verse, when Liddiard let’s out a heavy “Cliff has a beautiful WYYY-FFFFE” it’s with the intensity of Jeff Mangum singing “We know who our enem-eeeees AAAAAARRRRRR.”

It’s also in moments of restraint: “be proud of me my son, ‘cause I am finally off the fags,” “something inside D finds all this very, very strange,” “he’s got pictures of Adolf Hitler, antique copies of Mein Kampf,”  “he finds five Valium in a Winfield pack, in a duffel bag in the hall.”

The theme of the repulsive darkness, or the ugliness, underlying contemporary society is not new: alienation is one of, if not the, defining them of Modernism and its subsequent movements. What strikes me about “The Radicalisation of D” is that it is a story about how a person becomes aware of that lurking sickness within all things, and the life he lives as a result of it is off-screen, written in the history of the guy with the guitar.

Most of the scenes in the song, the severed Kangaroo leg, the doll roaring with ants, the bestiality tape, the old black alcoholics in the park, even Werner the Jew Burner, are taken from Liddiard’s life and reconfigured with an eye towards understanding a person like David Hicks, an Australian citizen arrested and imprisoned as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo Bay. 

The depressing series of unfortunate events that make up D’s life are the radicalization, and the songs final image, of the burning twin towers seen on television, is the catalyzing moment.

It may have been the catalyzing moment for me, as well. Before the Boston Marathon Bombing, the only other terrorist attack that even pinged my radar was 9/11. That day, we were called into the cafeteria of my school before recess and told that a plane had struck the Twin Towers in Manhattan.

“But,” the principal said, “no one’s sure just yet if there’s been an attack, it might just be an accident.”

At lunch that day Henry (a different Henry), said when I asked why kids were being taken out of school that day, “because parents are worried that the school might be a target.”

My own father didn’t pick me up until after the school day ended. I went home and sat in the TV room on the white couch, watching CNN for what felt like the first time. There were the images we were all familiar with of greasy black smoke billowing out of buildings, matched with new names like “Al-Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden.” I see myself as though I were outside of my body at the time, not in it: I’m laying on my stomach, my mouth twisted into the sad grimace that Sheep knew how to defuse so well with her intimacy. But this was nearly a decade before I’d meet Sheep.

My dad came into the TV room: “Everything ok Till?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I understand it’s upsetting.”

I don’t remember much more comfort than that. I’ve never known how to express my emotions.

America talks about that day as the end of an era where everything felt safe. I don’t know if I see it that way. I still felt safe, certainly, for most of my adolescence, or at least I remember a feeling of safety...

But I also feel just barely conscious of a kind of dark, horrible life hiding in the world around the safer, more comfortable one that I have lived in. Were it not for a supportive family I myself might be living a very different life at this very moment. There are people like D alive this very moment, people who walk the edges of our comfortable world and can see its sickness. Yes, they are depressed, but they are depressed because they see all the darkness, and none of the light that comes from human relations.

I think that I’ve been so stuck on “The Radicalisation of D” for the last week because it’s where I’m at right now. I feel vulnerable. And when I’ve felt vulnerable in the past, I too have wondered if there isn’t someway to feel less vulnerable by transmuting it into righteous fury. One of the few write-ups that exist for this song posits that it, “dares to suggest that [people drawn to terrorism] might be right.” But no, that’s not wholly correct. That’s the marxist filter looking a capitalism and saying, “you did this, you made us this way.”

Gareth Liddiard is not so politically ideological, at least not in “The Radicalisation of D.” As he repeats throughout the song, “you are living in a nightmare that you can’t bribe your way out of.” I keep returning to that line when my mind is at rest, whenever I’m feeling particularly harried. No, I’m not going to spend my way out of the rut int dirt that puts me up close and personal with the disgusting looking things underneath every day life. But how?

The answer to this question seems to be in who you surround yourself with. D himself has no one; emotionally stunted and abused, the only friends he seems to feel uncomplicated about are the alcoholics in the park.

But look at who D is now: he is Liddiard. A man who, while I can’t fully judge his happiness from knowing so little about him, seems to have a stable life. A girlfriend he loves. Work that allows him to explore the darker things that trouble him in a (what strikes me as) healthy way. I always fall back to something that John Darnielle (yet another guy with a guitar) once said, or quoted: “we don’t write to remember, but to forget.”

For more information on the content of “The Radicalisation of D,” refer to this line by line breakdown by Gareth Liddiard (via the Wayback machine).

[alisteningjournal]

Suki had pushed for me to listen to The Drones for a few years, but it never clicked until recently, after listening to a story about the band from Australian radio and Suki’s own description of the song “Jezebel” as “the Australian ‘Rubies.’”

I do not recommend listening to The Drones’ “Jezebel” while sitting on an exercise bike at the YMCA and staring at a row of TV monitors tuned to MSNBC, the local news, and Sports Center. The song is agita-inducing enough with that repeating klaxon guitar riff in the background as Gareth Liddiard rambles on about Strontium-90 and cruise missiles carving open the belly of the sky, but then to pair it with the actual weird reality of the last several months...

This morning, I woke up and read some of the New York Times front page. The world seems to be filled with nothing but escalating situations anymore: in North Korea, in Turkey, in France, here in the United States. I took a break from the news for a week to try and settle my nerves, only to come back to find that the President was trying to bomb his way to higher poll ratings (anyway you splice the Syrian situation seems bad: either the White House is making a cynical ploy to change the narrative, or the President genuinely made the decision to launch a ham-fisted bombing raid in without congressional approval based on an emotional response in a period of 63 hours).

And I can’t tell if things are really this bad, or I feel like the world is ending because my world, and the plans I’d made for myself all through the last three years were upended by the collapse of a relationship with someone I loved dearly.

I almost made it out of 2016, the year that killed everything, unscathed. Then the election happened, an uncle died, and the future got a whole lot darker. I don’t blame the election for my girlfriend breaking up with me–– that would be taking the world’s problems personally. But I also don’t see human life existing in a complete vacuum: the election outcome felt like ominous metonymy for the sorts of weird, world-changing events that happen all the time but seemed to proliferate within the last year.

“Jezebel” was written in the Bush era, and focuses on themes of the time: suicide bombings, wars for oil, western greed (something particular that Liddiard seems to have a bone to pick with). Nevertheless, it feels relevant still. It’s not even so much about the lyrics–– it’s that sense of chaos that hangs over the songs atmosphere. I try to avoid songs like “Jezebel” because I’m very susceptible to the emotions within a piece of music; and I already have quite a bit of anxiety without returning to the space I was in four or five years ago, when I was hate-reading the doomsayers of peak oil and the new age conspiracy theorists behind the 2012 apocalypse.

I wonder if things were always like this, and I was only able to ignore it because I felt like part of a secret team of two. I don’t trust very many people implicitly, but the people I am close to, for the times I am close to them, I trust completely. The loss of one of the closest relationships I’ve had–– behind only that of parent and child, or a decade long friendship–– has certainly made the world feel a little bit scary, the air-raid siren in “Jezebel” sound a bit louder.

[alisteningjournal]

“I ain’t here because he’s tall, I’m only here to see him fall...”