This song hit me hard when I was at the gym, running without stretching, sweating the blues off. The beauty of music, I guess, is that it can have the same meaning over time, but your role as a listener can change.
How can I achieve sustainability without puncturing love's work with the pressure of the depth I have learned to hone in thirty years? Perhaps as a Pisces, I can learn to swim in shallow waters. It doesn't mean I have to stop living in the bluest of the ocean, or that beauty is forfeited. It just means I'm more limber. And maybe that's a good thing.
The Blow will always remind me of a specific summer, with specific people, the messiness of fluidity, and the southside of Chicago. The blues were always there, always vibrant. It's definitely not present in the same way, but perhaps its hues can make themselves more visible, with time and thoughtfulness. I will not re-live heartbreak; I will transform it into a lifeboat. So nobody drowns.
"I still believe in the phrases that we breathed / But I know the distance isn't fair to cross"
The beauty of the additive shines through this song. Sometimes, simplicity accentuates function. It's why art is necessary in the first place.
Funny, how one lyric can direct you to a bridge of a song, then after another listen to the whole thing, realize it's the one you've been looking for all day. It seems a little odd that THIS is the Wilco song for Bluesday. I know their discography (pre 2015) better than any band and this song is not sad. Not at all. But I'm going through a paler shade of blue today. Kinda like fog off a lake right before dusk.
I never truly understood these lyrics before. I think it's because I've never had the love Tweedy is singing about in this song. I never truly understood these lyrics before tonight, and for that, I am grateful.
Don't get me wrong, I like the people here. But some Saturday nights you're missing home real hard and you just gotta yell at the dumbass drunk college kids as they jaywalk in black costumes in the darkness across Commonwealth Ave. on a red light. Sometimes you value your alone time to contemplate why you feel alone when you're far from it. Altered substitutions. The function is the same but this time around, it just sounds different. It just feels different. Sometimes you just gotta stay in on a Saturday night, take off that mask, and learn about Coltrane Changes again.
This place is old, it feels just like a beat up truck I turn the engine, but the engine doesn't turn It smells of cheap wine, cigarettes This place is always such a mess Sometimes I think I'd like to watch it burn I'm so alone and I feel just like somebody else Man, I ain't changed, but I know I ain't the same But somewhere here in between the city walls of dying dreams I think of death, it must be killing me Come on try a little, nothing is forever There's got to be something better than in the middle But me and Cinderella, we put it all together We can drive it home with one headlight
I don't know if I completely like the piano in this version. Usually I'm a sucker for the additive, but I feel like the automatic drive that happens in the drums right when you hit the gas pedal of the original version better suits the tone and lyrics of this song. Jakob Dylan said the "she" in this represents his band's originality and ideas, and the song is about the death of them.
There's got to be something better than in the middle. I know it's out there. Where is it, though? Am I even on the right road? How long will I be driving with one headlight?
I guess there's comfort in knowing that they make it home.
Oh and P.S. this song won a Grammy two years after it was released. The Nineties: when record sales lasted longer than two weeks. Maybe it'll take that long for me, too. Maybe shorter. Maybe longer. Who knows? NOBODY. SO STOP OVERTHINKING.
i just gotta remember that it's more than just me now i have to be better about managing my time remember what's most important not these petty little things not how i feel about the failures of humans in all different kinds of ways god they are so terrible but remember what's possible and remember what i'm here to do be disciplined practice my art do things to make me happy don't give into stupid shit take care of my body all this shit all of it
i need to raise the standard of my life. it's time to grow up from this petty bullshit way of life and reach excellence i deserve it and it starts by not being a shitty human being.
I couldn't take the fucketry today. And then I saw a tour announcement poster for the 10 year anniversary of ...And the Battle Begun. It's my second favourite Rx Bandits album (behind The Resignation), which had a large hand in shaping my politics straight outta high school. I kinda can't believe it's been 10 years. I remember seeing them at the old Bottom Lounge in Chicago when it was still off the Belmont Red Line station. I'd totally see them again, even without the horn section they used to have. They're remarkably good at painting continuity within the album, stroke by stroke, telling a story that has a beginning, middle, and end. We're transported into a different part of the world, the one we're taught to ignore: the place where we create fantasies, into Matt Embree's optimistic brain.
"At the end of the world we'll all have a big party from sea to sea and into the desert sands / we'll feel comfortable naked, won't need our prescriptions to say we're happy and admit we're all scared of growing old" - Epoxi-Lips
At what point in your life do you stop believing in destiny? Does growing-into-this-world mean losing that certain charm, that more than just whimsical attraction, that kind of lustful hope of a bad romance, intensity spilling over the gut of what is supposed to make sense? I re-watched How I Met Your Mother to catch all of the things I didn't catch before, and I guess this time around, I understand human relationships a little bit more. How the aftershock can cause a lasting effect, or doesn't, but how it can leave a mark, or won't. Perhaps I can make a compromise with this world. Perhaps synchronicity is real, and that fate is not always buried beneath a pile of casualties, dead weight one carries along the way. But how to manage mania, especially the kind that toys with the figurines in this never-less-than-romantic head: that's the real growing-into-this-world, I think. Perhaps then... maybe then, you can stop believing in destiny, and actually start living it.
I'll always be a sucker for beautiful, soaring melodies, even when they aren't soaring.
Sometimes when life has you running around New England and you're balancing on the tightropes of instability and you haven't really eaten anything all day and you're worried about where you're gonna live and if you have enough resources to follow through with all your plans and you're tired from shoveling all the snow and your tub's backed up and the Man keeps tryin to bring you down and you wonder if you're working to live or living to work and some bitch who isn't even paying attention doesn't say "thank you" when you give her her god damn vegan gluten-free organic falafel sandwich and you want to hate her so bad...
Sometimes you have to take seven minutes to just stop. Close your eyes. Breathe. Listen to the slow blues. Listen to that blues harp, let it infiltrate those open sores of this material world, and let yourself escape, let yourself have those seven minutes of pure human emotion, remind yourself that this is what keeps you connected, what validates all your plans to begin with. Never end a sentence with a preposition, unless it's a continuation of James Cotton's voice, which he rarely uses because of cancer, and count your blessings, count them all, because in about four days you get to LIVE the melodic line that happens around the 2:30 mark. Slow down, and surrender yourself to the colour blue.
Whenever I'm sad about feeling alone in a new city, I think about this quote by Laura Jane Grace in a Rolling Stone interview from 2012.
"The cliché is that you're a woman trapped in a man's body, but it's not that simple. It's a feeling of detachment from your body and from yourself. And it's shitty, man. It's really fucking shitty."
Though punk has its origins from across the pond in the mid 70's, there are definite similarities, structurally, to the blues; rock and roll's roots are the blues, Elvis became King because Chuck Berry was black, etc. etc. etc. Take any 12 bar blues, don't swing the eighth notes, speed it up, like quadruple time, play only power chords, add distortion to the guitar, a couple of snare hits on the offbeats, add lyrics about defying the system and doing whatever the fuck you wanna do, and voilà! You've got The Ramones - "I Wanna Be Sedated."
Against Me! came out with Transgender Dysphoria Blues in 2014, three years after announcing a new album, two years after Laura Jane Grace came out as trans, and one year after the most fucked up year of my life. It's true punk rock; she says everything that needs to be said in ten songs under three and a half minutes, and the entire album itself is less than 29 minutes long. Yet its effects are everlasting- it's the most personal release Against Me! has ever had- as Laura sheds all armour protecting the burdens of her repressed spirit and, literally, body, behind that gritty, raspy, unabashed voice. While super-politicized previous releases like Searching for a Former Clarity and As the Eternal Cowboy dealt with the woes of being "different" and rising up in a capitalist political system, Laura Jane explicitly and courageously talks about her struggles of transitioning, no metaphor, of being a woman in both an aggressively male-dominated punk scene and in this transphobic country. This is her every day life.
"You want them to see you like they see any other girl / They just see a faggot / They hold their breath not to catch the sick"
I remember listening to this song in the front room of my dusty Pilsen apartment, buried in snow and freezing cold. Acidic tears ran down my cheeks after the title track played. While I think it's inappropriate to compare being gay with being trans, I related to the... desolate loneliness... of her struggle. Though I didn't have gender dysphoria, I had dysphoria of the soul, feeling completely dissatisfied of a situation I thought would never change. Feeling stuck in mud, but eventually making pillows out of quicksand. At least it seemed like someone was holding me, sucking me down six feet under the dirt. It's like someone threw a blanket over my head after my heart had already stopped beating from hypothermia. It's feeling detached from your body, being completely unaware of your self, going through the motions just to fill up space. It's the most lonely feeling in the world.
Transgender Dysphoria Blues received crazy good critical acclaim in 2014, and rightfully so. Musically, it might not be the best Against Me! album ever released. But Laura Jane Grace lifted her veil of insecurity, revealing her true beauty, explaining to us all what it actually MEANS to be transgender, and doing it flawlessly. This is her. Finally.
