Where We Are This Week 09/01/2023
The value of music, Blur, a trip to Mississippi, and the contradiction of American life.
I’ve read McCarthy and Twain. I’ve read Williams and Lee. But I’ve never read William Faulkner.
As a lifelong Southerner, I have no excuse - but after this weekend, it will no longer be the case. I’ve always been just about to read a Faulkner novel but something else drew me away.
My wife and I are taking our first trip with our daughter to Oxford, Mississippi for the long weekend, and as such, we’ll be visiting the estate of one William Faulkner. So, in an effort to right the wrongs of the previous decade and a half, I bought As I Lay Dying from our friend’s bookstore and will be reading it whenever our little girl has had enough and crashes from all of the stimulation the trip promises.
When I’m done, the book will find its way to its new place on my bookshelf and there it will stay until I need to reference it, loan it, or pull it out at a party to prove how pretentious I can be. But more importantly, for $10, the book and the ideas that reside within it, now belong to me.
I’m not a collector by habit, I’m a collector by necessity. Every book and record I own is like an addition to the human compendium I’m building in my mind. I figure the more I absorb, the more I’ll understand what I’m supposed to be doing with my life. For those of you of my generation, it’s like my cultural Pokédex.
It’s always been a marvel to me that for a few dollar bills, I can own a piece of art - something someone labored on for months - in perpetuity. I’ve always been a little too tight with my money, but I don’t regret the $12.99 I spent on Weezer’s ‘The Blue Album’ when I was 12 or so. I think it’s safe to say I’ve got my money’s worth out of it by now.
As for the trip, I’m happy to check off another box of parenthood and becoming the thing I always figured I would be but found it hard to conceptualize - a dad in a minivan taking his family on vacation.
A new book is a lot like traveling to a new place, a world unexplored and a lesson to be learned. Both things you can keep with you for as long as you want and both are made infinitely better by those with whom you share it.
Polite Society
It’s one thing to recognize contradictions in yourself, but what do you do when you notice them in all of society? I listened to Eric Weinstein on the Triggernometry podcast a couple of months ago and one of the hosts said something about not having faith in any institution anymore.
Weinstein had quite an insightful response when he diagnosed the problem in further detail. He said that the previous statement wasn’t entirely true because you might trust the airline to arrive late or botch your flight, but you also trust them to get you to your destination in one piece.
So, what do you do with the massive contradiction this example presents? What level of incompetence becomes so intolerable that the public says ‘enough is enough’? How is it that we’re going through an existential crisis of not being able to delineate between the two sexes, yet, our medical professionals aren’t chronically misdiagnosing their patients? Where do we draw the line, and when do we know if, indeed, we are off the rails?
How do you understand the contradiction?
On the one hand, the thin veneer of polite society seems like it’s crumbling before our eyes. Homelessness is taking over the great cities of the American West, mass looting of department stores is routine, and violence and hate crimes are on the rise. In this way, one would think that the mask is definitely coming off.
But oppositely, the American public was lied to about the legitimacy of two decades-long wars, the efficacy of masks and vaccines, and the credulity of the 2016 and 2020 elections yet the machinations of modern life continue unabated as if nothing occurred.
And in the imminent future, we’ll cross the threshold of jailing a former president. Not for war crimes or jailing journalists, heavens no, we couldn’t go incarcerating the last fifty years of POTUS’s could we? But what happens then? Is the moment Donald Trump goes to jail as significant as I think it will be or will everyone just turn off their television sets and wait for their UberEats?
There’s a portion of society that has clearly realized the facade of American exceptionalism was just being taped together, while the rest of us go about our business.
But the rhetoric does seem to be getting more violent. Biden’s always talking about the ‘hate that is hiding amongst Americans’ and the right likes their guns a little more than I think I’m comfortable with. I’m even made a little nervous by Vivek Ramaswamy when invokes the word ‘revolution’ in debates or interviews. I know he only means it politically and rhetorically, but I don’t know what everyone else is thinking, the collective mood is simmering.
What I’m trying to say is that it feels like we’re edging towards a precipice where the moors of conventional American life and governance could be rejected in favor of something else - it’s not clear to me that either wing of the political divide possesses a coherent enough vision for the future to construct anything worthwhile, however. So, if some great fallout does happen, I wouldn’t expect some glorious alternative to arise in its place.
But maybe, that will come to fruition either. Maybe, we’ll fly through the guard rails, turn the radio up, and continue to text on our phones until we crash. I’m not sure which would be worse.
Music, who’s listening?
To those who know me best, it will come as no surprise that I often look across the pond to the land of our forefathers (Europe) with unrepentant jealousy.
It’s probably a case of the grass always being greener, but in this case, you can substitute ‘grass’ for architecture, food, culture, and art. American grass ain’t so bad, but I’ll be the first to admit there’s something about not having a thousand years plus of history undergirding society that puts us at an unfair advantage.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but New York basically was. I think it shows.
Regardless, I love European sports more than American ones - baseball is still pretty great - and I’m always comparing musical output between the States and our former overlords, the United Kingdom. The British Invasion and subsequent years saw the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and T. Rex commandeer American radio stations and permanently alter the trajectory of American music.
Flipping through my favo(u)rite records, the stack from the tiny island off the coast of mainland Europe is daunting - until I remind myself of American icons like the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and The Doors. We’re on the scoreboard! There’s been plenty of great UK and American acts since then, but that’s when the battle truly started in earnest.
Since the late ‘80s however, the crossover - at least from East to West - has been less than it used to be. But it’s not like either country ceased to make great music, on the contrary, some of the best artists of the modern era have come in the last three decades or so. The difference, I have come to realize, is in their reception by their respective countries.
Granted, this is where I drift into my own kind of musical snobbery, and the statements become increasingly subjective - no matter how much I insist that they are true. But, it’s undeniable to me that my home country, despite producing exceptional artists in their own right, has no great appreciation for great art. England, however, has a much better track record.
Let’s go back to the ‘60s for a brief moment. The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel alike were critically acclaimed musical acts yet also achieved massive popularity in the general population while consistently topping the charts. In 1964, The Beatles topped the American charts with their debut, Meet the Beatles, and then replaced themselves at the number one position with The Beatles’ Second Album. Only a few years later in 1968, Simon and Garfunkel repeated this feat with Bookends and The Graduate (Soundtrack).
You might be surprised to learn that it was a full five decades before an artist was able to replicate these results in the United States. You may be even more surprised to learn that the artist that achieved such esteemed heights was the rapper, Future whose largest commercial success came in 2017’s Mask Off where he sang the praises of molly and Percocet for an entire, mind-numbing 3:24.
What changed? We did. My wife has a hypothesis that you can map the trajectory of modern music by which drugs were in vogue during each era. We won’t delve into the specifics of that notion here, but suffice it to say, our music was a lot better in the heydays of LSD, heroin, and marijuana than prescription pills and antidepressants.
Take, for instance, my personal Big 4 UK bands from the last three decades or so: Oasis, Blur, the Arctic Monkeys, and Radiohead. Not only has each one of these acts achieved almost unrivaled critical acclaim - they have dominated the pop charts since the early ‘90s compiling several #1 records each.
Okay, now contrast that with whom I presume to be their American counterparts: Spoon, Wilco, My Morning Jacket, and the Killers. Yes, the Killers are the exception to the rule here, but aside from the Las Vegas outfit, none of the other three - and a whole host of successful American bands - have ever accomplished a number-one record in the States.
What plays on Top 40 versus what the connoisseur listens to has never been so contradictory in the modern era - and that point isn’t meant to elevate the so-called connoisseur but to illustrate how fractious our culture is today. We don’t share a common vision, and can’t seem to agree on what endeavors are worth pursuing.
In fact, it’s more than just a divergence of opinion - there’s a growing sense of nihilism and cynicism on both sides of the political aisle. There’s a reason why the climate activists at home and abroad are vandalizing classical works of art and not post-modernist productions like Andres Serrano’s Immersion (the photo involving a certain carpenter submerged in a certain bodily fluid). Conversely, it’s also an explanation for why “Rich Men North of Richmond” has become so popular to the right - a song that disparages the poorest among us and offers no positive vision of the future.
I don’t blame the artists per se as it’s hard to see who’s at fault here, the performer or the audience, it’s a vicious cycle. What came first, the chicken or Demi Lovato?
The Narcissist
This is the essay I was trying to write when I accidentally wrote the one directly above this one. I was just trying to provide a little context for why I feel the way I do about this subject I got a little carried away. But, now that it’s out of the way, you might understand why Blur’s newest record is truly refreshing.
Last month, one of the world’s biggest bands made a triumphant return to the charts with The Ballad of Darren. I had to wait while my local record store ordered it for me - that alone is indicative of the world we live in. Either that or just how out of touch I am with the zeitgeist.
Earlier this year, Blur released the lead single to their first album since 2015’s The Magic Whip earlier this year. My wife and I must have watched the YouTube video of ‘The Narcissist’ a solid twenty times before we were able to bring the record home.
When the record debuted, it shot to the #1 spot on the UK charts - a feat I can’t imagine a similar record repeating here in the States. First of all, the lead single, ‘The Narcissist’, isn’t some booming, written-for-arenas, pop tune. It’s a melodic four minutes of vulnerability and introspection.
It’s hard to believe some of the lyrics like Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tamborine Man’ ever graced the pop charts. Surely, lines like this one had a positive effect on the cultural consciousness of the time.
‘Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,; With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,; Let me forget about today until tomorrow.’
Maybe, I’m being too naive, and placing far too much importance on the vitality of art - but I’m yet to be convinced of that, and I firmly believe that art serves as a catalyst and reflection of the society from which it was derived.
So, to see one of my favorite bands release a record that was never intended to have ‘a summer anthem’ or ‘sing-a-long choruses’ to garner massive success is incredibly heartening. The whole record is wonderful to listen to - it captures the punk rock of Blur’s past while evincing a more contented maturity, and ‘The Narcissist’ itself is a special tune. Albarn sings about humility, ego, and the Almighty - all in a number one record.
‘Oh, glorious world
Oh, potent waves valleys gone wild
Connect us to love
And keep us peaceful for a while’
To a better next week.
Cheers,
~FDA